David Mccracken

“After Babel postulates that translation is formally and pragmatically implicit in every act of communication, in the emission and reception of each and every mode of meaning, be it in the widest semiotic sense or in more specifically verbal exchanges. To understand is to decipher. To hear significance is to translate.”
― George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation

“And suddenly, in view of these reflections, Ulrich had to smile and admit to himself that he was, after all, a character, even without having one.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

“It may be—I will argue so—that communication outward is only a secondary, socially stimulated phase in the acquisition of language. Speaking to oneself would be the primary function (considered by L. S. Vygotsky in the early 1930s, this profoundly suggestive hypothesis has received little serious examination since).”
― George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation

“It was now that I began sensibly to feel how much more happy this life I now led was, with all its miserable circumstances, than the wicked, cursed, abominable life I led all the past part of my days; and now I changed both my sorrows and my joys; my very desires altered, my affections changed their gusts, and my delights were perfectly new from what they were at my first coming, or, indeed, for the two years past.”
― Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe