Flybyreader

“There was no innate, perfectly comprehensible language; there was no candidate, not English, not French, that could bully and absorb enough to become one. Language was just difference. A thousand different ways of seeing, of moving through the world. No, a thousand worlds within one. And translation - a necessary endeavour, however futile, to move between them”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“Mankind is inherently inclined towards cooperation," Holmes said. It is how we create societies and moral consensus. We want to agree with one another, on the whole. Thus, if one of us insists a certain thing is true, and maintains his standpoint in the face of all opposition, others will eventually come around to his way of thinking.”
― James Lovegrove, Sherlock Holmes & the Christmas Demon

“She will find that she has no good reason to ask
her brother to fight on her behalf to protect “our” country. “‘Our country,’” she will say, “throughout the greater part of its history has treated me as a slave; it has denied me education or any share in its possessions. ‘Our’ country still ceases to be mine if I marry a foreigner. ‘Our’ country denies me the means of protecting myself, forces me to pay others a very large sum annually to protect me, and is so little able, even so, to protect me that Air Raid precautions are written on the wall. Therefore if you insist upon fighting to protect me, or ‘our’ country, let it be understood, soberly and rationally between us, that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits which I have not shared and probably will not share; but not to gratify my instincts, or to protect either myself or my country. For,” the outsider will say, “in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.”
― Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas

“Translation involves a spatial dimension - a literal transportation of texts across conquered territory, words delivered likes spices from an alien land. Words mean something quite different when they journey from the palaces of Rome to the tea-rooms of today’s Britain.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel