Cole

“I just want everything to be like it was," Eileen said. "And for us to be young again and live near each other, and nothing to be different."

Alice was smiling sadly. "But if things are different, can we still be friends?”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“That's just what translation is, I think. That's all speaking is. Listening to the other and trying to see past your own biases to glimpse what they're trying to say. Showing yourself to the world, and hoping someone else understands.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“Trying, he thought, to express some unutterable truth about themselves. Which was that translation was impossible. That the realm of pure meaning they captured and manifested would and could not ever be known. That the enterprise of this tower had been impossible from inception. For how could there ever be an Adamic language? The thought now made him laugh. There was no innate, perfectly comprehensible language. There was no candidate - not English, not French - that could bully and absorb enough to become one. Language was just difference. A thousand different ways of seeing, of moving through the world. No, a thousand worlds within one. And translation, a necessary endeavor however futile, to move between them.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“Memories can also be thought of as dreamlike. They’re more a romantic story than a faithful document of a life event. And there’s good content to be found in these dreamy recollections we have of past experiences.”
― Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being