Daniel Bento

“Stories were living inside us. I think we were born to tell our stories. After we died, our stories would survive. Maybe it was our stories that fed the universe the energy it needed to keep on giving life.

Maybe all we were meant to do on this earth was to keep on telling stories. Our stories—and the stories of the people we loved.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World

“Translation means doing violence upon the original, means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So then where does that leave us? How can we conclude, except by acknowledging that an act of translation is then necessarily always an act of betrayal?”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“Reading lets us live in someone else’s shoes. Literature builds bridges; it makes our world larger, not smaller.”
― R.F. Kuang, Yellowface

“Every writer I know feels this way about someone else. Writing is such a solitary activity. You have no assurance that what you’re creating has any value, and any indication that you’re behind in the rat race sends you spiraling into the pits of despair. Keep your eyes on your own paper, they say. But that’s hard to do when everyone else’s papers are flapping constantly in your face.”
― R.F. Kuang, Yellowface