Charlie Coombe > Charlie's Quotes

“Every act of communication is an act of translation.”
― Gregory Rabassa

“So the poor translator must not just go back and forth between two languages, but if he is worthy of his calling must shift between two selves, with all the perils of this induced schizophrenia.”
― Gregory Rabassa, If This Be Treason: Translation and its Dyscontents

“The translator, we should know, is a writer too. As a matter of fact, he could be called the ideal writer because all he has to do is write; plot, theme, characters, and all other essentials have already been provided, so he can just sit down and write his ass off. (p. 8)”
― Gregory Rabassa, If This Be Treason: Translation and its Dyscontents

“Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions too, with a similarly homogenising, whitening, deadening effect. Amidst the glossiness of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feeling - depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage - are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structural injustice or, on the other hand, to the native texture of embodiment, of doing time, as David Wojnarowicz memorably put it, in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails.”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“Abajo está la piscina. El matrimonio ruso toma el sol en una tumbona de mimbre tamaño familiar. Ella: bikini rosado con piedras incrustadas; él: zunga negra con pequeñísimos lunares de espejo. Sus tres hijos rubios están chapoteando en el agua con la que debe ser su abuela materna —es la misma cara de ella, pero caída: un viento la sopló fuerte desde arriba. La playa está limpia. El cielo también. Ningún alga, ninguna nube. Sombrillas y sillas alineadas frente al mar.”
― Margarita García Robayo, Tiempo muerto

“Estaba en crisis, era cierto, pero —pensó Lucía y se llenó de furia—: ¿quién no estaba en crisis?”
― Margarita García Robayo, Tiempo muerto

“Abría los ojos en la noche, sentía la turgencia en su barriga, el movimiento interno, y pensaba: mi cuerpo es una casa invadida por aliens.”
― Margarita García Robayo, Tiempo muerto

“Sus alumnos tenían la facultad de vaciarlo de criterio. De hacerle perder el entusiasmo por absolutamente todo. Y de convertir su mundo en un abismo.”
― Margarita García Robayo, Tiempo muerto

“pero un día te vas a dar cuenta de que un hombre sin raíces es un hombre muerto.”
― Margarita García Robayo, Tiempo muerto

“Lucía le dijo: «Yo a veces imagino que Gonzalo se mete a Elisa entera por el culo y ella asciende por su intestino, nadando veloz, y se empasta de mierda y le sale por la boca, disparada, como un hueso atascado en el esófago». Después apoyó la cabeza en la almohada y se puso a mordisquear un chupo viejo de los niños que encontró entre el borde de la cama y la pared.”
― Margarita García Robayo, Tiempo muerto

“mantener los afectos es cuestión de disciplina.”
― Margarita García Robayo, Tiempo muerto

“la patria es eso que se muda contigo.”
― Margarita García Robayo, Tiempo muerto

“«El desarraigo te será funcional en términos retóricos», le dijo un día Pablo —intentando imitar ese lenguaje de mujercita clean y sobreeducada que ella, a su vez, también impostaba—, «pero un día te vas a dar cuenta de que un hombre sin raíces es un hombre muerto».”
― Margarita García Robayo, Tiempo muerto

“Eso tienen, aparte de hijos y ollas: asentamientos de tiempo muerto que ninguno se ha dignado a remover.”
― Margarita García Robayo, Tiempo muerto

“My mother forbade us to walk backwards. That is how the dead walk, she would say. Where did she get this idea? Perhaps from a bad translation. The dead, after all, do not walk backwards but they do walk behind us. They have no lungs and cannot call out but would love for us to turn around. They are victims of love, many of them.”
― Anne Carson

“You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.
Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

“Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.”
― Anne Carson (Translator), Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

“Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“Words

Be careful of words,
even the miraculous ones.
For the miraculous we do our best,
sometimes they swarm like insects
and leave not a sting but a kiss.
They can be as good as fingers.
They can be as trusty as the rock
you stick your bottom on.
But they can be both daisies and bruises.
Yet I am in love with words.
They are doves falling out of the ceiling.
They are six holy oranges sitting in my lap.
They are the trees, the legs of summer,
and the sun, its passionate face.
Yet often they fail me.
I have so much I want to say,
so many stories, images, proverbs, etc.
But the words aren't good enough,
the wrong ones kiss me.
Sometimes I fly like an eagle
but with the wings of a wren.
But I try to take care
and be gentle to them.
Words and eggs must be handled with care.
Once broken they are impossible
things to repair.”
― Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems

“It's hard to write and be open and let things in when life is tough, but to keep everything out means there's nothing to work with.”
― Deborah Levy, The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography

“I have always wanted to go to Trieste because it sounds like tristesse, which is a light-hearted word, even though in French it means sadness. In Spanish it is tristeza, which is heavier than French sadness, more of a groan than a whisper.”
― Deborah Levy, Hot Milk

“Loners are the opposition. Pensive, thoughtful and furious, marooned with stories that need to be spoken out loud and no one to listen, curries to be cooked and no one to taste, days and days of traffic signals to be manoeuvred and no one to congratulate except other loners: they find each other because like all good maps there are familiar signs that lead the way. The loner who both observes and creates worlds necessarily speaks with many tongues. It is with these tongues that she explores the contours of the centre and the margins, the signs for somewhere and elsewhere and here and now.”
― Deborah Levy, Swallowing Geography

“we do not have to conform to the way our life has been written for us, especially by those who are less imaginative than ourselves.”
― Deborah Levy, Real Estate: A Living Autobiography

“As Simone de Beauvoir had told us, women are not supposed to eclipse men in a world in which success and power are marked out for them. It is not easy to take up the historic privilege of dominance over women... if he is economically dependent on her talents. At the same time, she receives the fatal message that she must conceal her talents and abilities in order to be loved by him.”
― Deborah Levy, The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography

“I am not okay. Not at all and haven´t been for some time. I did not tell her how discouraged I felt and that I was ashamed I was not more resilient an all the rest of it which included wanting a bigger life but that so far I had not been bold enough to make a bid for things I wanted to happen....”
― Deborah Levy, Hot Milk

“I had energy because I had no choice but to have energy. I had to write to support my children and I had to do all the heavy lifting. Freedom is never free. Anyone who has struggled to be free knows how much it costs.”
― Deborah Levy, The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography

“Smoking cheap Spanish filthy sock-tobacco under a pine tree was so much better than trying to hold it together on escalators. There was something comforting about being literally lost when I was lost in every other way...”
― Deborah Levy, Things I Don't Want to Know

“How do we set about not imagining something?”
― Deborah Levy, Hot Milk