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"At what point does childhood sadness become adult sadness anyway?"

"'You wanna be a writer and you want to jump off a bridge? That's pretty much the same thing, no?A writer just takes longer to hit the water."

real

"Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed. How could they be the initiators, if they themselves are the result of violence? How could they be the sponsors of something whose objective inauguration called forth their existence as oppressed? There would be no oppressed had there been no prior situation of violence to establish their subjugation."

"'You think there's some nobility in being above anger?'"

"'--I passed over that moment, the moment I could've died but didn't, and I didn't even know it. I didn't even know it happened. And everything since has been bonus, you know?'"

"'The pain we feel comes from them, not ourselves,' said the banners, and people cheered, certain of all the certainty. But the next day they'd wake up and find that what had hurt in them still hurt."

"Very few people believed that they were bad, and this was the scariest part. Human nature could be so hideous, but it persisted in this ugliness by insisting it was good."

"But when I am away from Reuben, living out there in the world as only myself, being 'free', I do not find anywhere near the depth of love and warmth that I have when I am with him."

"I remember being told (or did I overhear it?) that he would probably never be able to do a whole host of things. From day one, those comments instilled in our family a determination that we'd do everything we could to prove them all wrong."

"I will have to be much more than his brother. I will have to be his carer, his parent, his friend, his interpreter in a world that doesn't want to understand him."

"Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self-delusion, masking from ourselves this single truth: that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat? To be degraded, damaged, slaughtered - is this the essential fate of humankind, one which history has confirmed as inevitable?"

"I found out later that the army had been provided with eight hundred thousand rounds that day. This was at a time when the population of the city stood at four hundred thousand. In other words, they had been given the means to drive a bullet into the body of every person in the city twice over."

"'I couldn't communicate with anyone in my family. So I often imagined I was adopted. For some reason some distant relatives gave me up to my family. Or maybe they got me from an orphanage. Now I realize how silly that idea was. My parents aren't the type to adopt a helpless orphan. Anyway, I couldn't accept the fact that I was related by blood to these people. It was easier to think they were complete strangers."

"Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the Earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?"

"'You've always written because you wanted to. If you don't want to any more, why should you? Do you think your not writing is going to cause a village to burn to the ground? A ship to sink? The tides to get messed up? Or set the revolution back five years? Hardly.'"

"'Why did you love him when you could've loved me?' she said. 'What does he have that I don't, other than he's a boy and I'm a girl?'
But I had loved her all my life. I had loved her before we knew what the world was, what love was, and who we ourselves were. But all these things I could not say."

"Her French was not good, but you did not need to be fluent in a language to be unpleasant."

"It baffles me that often songs and poems are written about love at first sight: those who claim to experience the phenomena have preened themselves, ready for love. There is nothing extraordinary about that. Childhood friendship, much more fatal, simply happens."

"Some people have to figure out what they want from a life before they commit to that life. Some, like me, can commit to anything, which is like committing to nothing."

"'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.'"

"'You want to do the right thing,' said Ramy, bullish. 'You always do. But you think the right thing is martyrdom. You think if you suffer enough for whatever sins you've committed, then you're absolved.'"

"English did not just borrow words from other languages; it was stuffed to the brim with foreign influences, a Frankenstein vernacular. And Robin found it incredible, how this country, whose citizens prided themselves so much on being better than the rest of the world, could not make it through an afternoon tea without borrowed goods."

literally how i felt studying english language history and linguistics hahaa

"'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?'"

"'The poet runs untrammelled across the meadow. The translator dances in shackles.'"

"'So you see, translators do not so much deliver a message as they rewrite the original. And herein lies the difficulty - rewriting is still writing, and writing always reflects the author's ideology and biases.'"

"'Anyway, live translation isn't considered all that glamorous, because all that really matters is that you get your basic points across without offending anyone. You don't get to play around with the intricacies of language, which is of course where the real fun is.'"

big agree

"'Languages are easier to forget than you imagine,' he said. 'Once you stop living in the world of Chinese, you stop thinking in Chinese.'"

so true it's like they start to devour each other in your brain if you give one too much power over the others

"'Languages are easier to forget than you imagine,' he said. 'Once you stop living in the world of Chinese, you stop thinking in Chinese.'"

too real it's like they try to devour each other in your brain if you give one too much power over the other

"'Translate, please.'
This all hinged on him, Robin realized. The choice was his. Only he could determine the truth, because only he could communicate it to all parties."

"I can't help it, it's what I've always done. The way some women change fashion regularly, I change personalities. What persona feels good, what's coveted, what's au courant? I think most people do this, they just don't admit to it, or else they settle on one persona because they're too lazy or stupid to pull off a switch."