Lobna Boukadi

“Translation is like any art: in the best of cases, it helps shed light on ourselves, on those hidden corners of ourselves that we barely knew existed, and whose discovery has enriched us. It exposes us to minds and voices able to awaken in us a particular sense of delight, an irreplaceable thrill of discovery that is avail- able nowhere else. The ability of these minds and voices to do this is unique, not because they come from a foreign land—or at least, not solely because of it—but because they are sui generis, as exceptional in their own culture as they appear in ours.”
― Mark Polizzotti

“Encore sous le choc, nous étions en train de comprendre que faire ce que nous avions toujours fait pouvait désormais nous valoir une condamnation, qu'il suffisait d'une blague, d'un bon mot, d'une seule phrase, pour que la police déboule à l'aube et nous embarque. Face au vague et à l'immensité de cette menace nouvelle, il ne nous restait que la peur, une peur muette, collective.”
― Ahmet Altan, Madame Hayat

“I started to make a literary being of myself, someone who lives as if her experiences were to be written down someday.”
― Annie Ernaux, Mémoire de fille

“All of us, more or less, wear masks. Because without masks we can’t survive in this violent world. Beneath an evil-spirit mask lies the natural face of an angel, beneath an angel’s mask lies the face of an evil spirit. It’s impossible to have just one or the other. That’s who we are. And that’s Carnaval. Schumann was able to see the many faces of humanity—the masks and the real faces—because he himself was a deeply divided soul, a person who lived in the stifling gap in between the two.”
― Haruki Murakami, First Person Singular: Stories