Wendy Lesser > Quotes

“Nothing takes you out of yourself the way a good book does, but at the same time nothing makes you more aware of yourself as a solitary creature, possessing your own particular tastes, memories, associations, beliefs. Even as it fully engages you with another mind (or maybe many other minds, if you count the characters’ as well as the author’s), reading remains a highly individual act. No one will ever do it precisely the way you do.”
― Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books

“I suppose if I had to give a one-word answer to the question of why I read, that word would be pleasure. The kind of pleasure you can get from reading is like no other in the world.”
― Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books

“The slight, the facile and the merely self-glorifying tend to drop away over the centuries, and what we are left with is the bedrock: Homer and Milton, the Greek tragedian and Shakespeare, Chaucer and Cervantes and Swift, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and James and Conrad. Time does not make their voices fainter, on the contrary, it reinforces our sense of their truth-telling capacity.”
― Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books

“T. S. Eliot, who remarked in one of his essays that immature poets imitate, mature poets steal).”
― Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books

“As Plato said, all poets are liars. This does not mean we should mistrust them.”
― Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books

“man lives not for the fulfilment of his destiny, not for the incarnation of an idea, not for progress, but solely because he was born;”
― Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books

“Reading literature is a way of reaching back to something bigger and older and different. It can give you the feeling that you belong to the past as well as the present, and it can help you realize that your present will someday be someone else’s past. This may be disheartening, but it can also be strangely consoling at times.”
― Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books

“Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.”
― Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books

“I can call spirits from the vasty deep,”
― Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books

“PROLOGUE: WHY I READ It’s not a question I can completely answer. There are abundant reasons, some of them worse than others and many of them mutually contradictory. To pass the time. To savor the existence of time. To escape from myself into someone else’s world. To find myself in someone else’s words. To exercise my critical capacities. To flee from the need for rational explanations. And even the obvious”
― Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books

“Things can only be true in a specific way, for one reader at a time, at a particular moment in a reader's life.”
― Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books

“The ideal of unmediated reporting is regularly achieved only in fiction, where the writer faithfully reports on what is going on in his imagination.”
― Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books

“يُفقد الكثير دوماً أثناء الترجمة، فتحدث بعض الفجوات، ثم يتسرب الكثير من السوء إلى ذلك الفراغ.”
― Wendy Lesser, عبقرية اللغة

“Pride and Prejudice’s “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a fortune must be in want of a wife.”
― Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books

“When it comes to literature, we are all groping in the dark, even the writer. Especially the writer. And that is a good thing--maybe one of the best things about literature. It's always an adventure of some kind.”
― Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books

“ليس ثمة مفردة لـ (نعم أو لا) في الصينية، لكن الدافع وراء هذا الغياب ليس الحياء أو الاستتار بالضرورة. إن المقابل لـ (نعم أو لا) في الصينية هو سترهما وذلك باستخدام الكلمات الموجودة في السؤال نفسه.”
― Wendy Lesser, عبقرية اللغة

“Satyr,” he says, “is a sort of Glass, wherein Beholders do generally discover every body’s Face but their Own; which is the chief Reason for that kind Reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
― Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books

“Why, so can I, or so can any man; / But will they come when you do call for them?”
― Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books

“can give you the feeling that you belong to the past as well as the present,”
― Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books

“cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety”)”
― Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books

“Part of the pleasure has to do with a sense of efficiency, of materials exactly allocated and completely used. Another part has to do with a sense of inevitability, the feeling that someone knew where we were headed all along, even if we and the characters did not.”
― Wendy Lesser

“help you realize that your present will someday be someone else’s past.”
― Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books

“وصلت الحالة الى أن تسربت الانجليزية داخلي لدرجة أنني حين أرى أسرتي في المنام، فإني أراهم يتحدثون بها مع بعضهم بعضا. لم أكن أظن أن ذاك الصوت الأجنبي قادر على السفر إلى هذا العمق في روح الانسان.”
― Wendy Lesser, عبقرية اللغة

“By virtue of the literary work over which they meet, the reader and the writer both begin to loosen their hold on selfhood.”
― Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books

“أن يرمي بك القدر خارج تراب أرض الأجداد يعني أن ترافقك الضراء إلى الأبد.”
― Wendy Lesser , عبقرية اللغة

“عاطفي، متعال، فخور، قنوع من الطبقة الكادحة، غضوب من الطبقة الكادحة، طموح من الطبقة الكادحة، صلب، عقلاني، متعلم، فنان، مزارع، وملايين من الاحتمالات التي نعلّب الناس اجتماعياً داخلها باستخدام اللغة.”
― Wendy Lesser, عبقرية اللغة

“تحاصرنا أمريكا: مجتمع كبير تقوده يد الاعلام، ومجتمع سعيد بالآلات التي تسهل حياته. صورة هذا المجتمع ولغته هي أداة التواصل المشترك بين شعوب العالم أجمع؛ أما روائح عطورهم الزهرية وابتساماتهم اليسيرة فهي أمر يتجاوز قدرتي على الاستيعاب. وها أنا جالس وحدي على طاولة الغداء، صغير البدن وكبير النظارات، مرتديا قميص روسي الصنع مزينا بالمربعات. وما الذي أفعله؟ أتحدث إلى نفسي. أتحدث الى نفسي بالروسية.”
― Wendy Lesser, عبقرية اللغة

“جاء اللاجئون محملين بحكايات الحرق والنهب والاغتصاب. وعبر دموعهم وكوابيسهم وعويلهم تعلّمت مفردة (خوف) باللغة البنغالية وماتحمله من الألم والصدى، وبميزان الرعب الذي رأيته في وجوههم فإني لا أستطيع أن أدرك كلمة انجليزية تقابل ما تحمله مفردة (خوف) البنغالية.”
― Wendy Lesser, عبقرية اللغة

“بدت الكتابة الانجليزية ابتداء وكأنني أحاول حرث ساحة من الرخام: أمر مستحيل التحصيل، وافساد لمواد نافعة دون أي شيء في المقابل.”
― Wendy Lesser, عبقرية اللغة

“You have to go to a museum to look at paintings, attend a concert to hear live music, pick up a novel if you intend to read it. These art forms are, in that respect, relatively passive. Architecture, on the other hand, is aggressive: it surrounds us all the time, not just in our homes and offices but in public places. It is ever-present and often forgettable, but even when we aren’t particularly focused on it, it can make us feel better or worse, depending on its quality.”
― Wendy Lesser, You Say to Brick: The Life of Louis Kahn