Home > Work > That Mad Ache & Translator, Trader: An Essay on the Pleasantly Pervasive Paradoxes of Translation (Afterword)
1 " Nothing brings on jealousy like laughter. "
― Françoise Sagan , That Mad Ache & Translator, Trader: An Essay on the Pleasantly Pervasive Paradoxes of Translation (Afterword)
2 " He knew this euphoria of hers: it was the euphoria of being alone. "
3 " Ever since, I’ve been looking everywhere for parents, in my lovers, in my friends, and it’s all right with me to have nothing of my own — not any plans and not any worries. I like this kind of life, it’s terrible but true. I don’t know why it is, but the moment I wake up something in me feels things are going right. "
4 " When I was a child”? Only the nostalgia for those days of utter, absolute irresponsibility, now long gone. But for her (and this she would never have admitted to anyone), those days weren’t gone at all. She still felt totally irresponsible. "
5 " The number of times she’d said “wait and see” to herself in her thirty years of existence was way beyond counting. "
6 " Her utter lack of self-importance made her passionate. In a word, she was happy. "
7 " Life was becoming for Lucile what it was for her Métro-riding companions, and what writers so often depicted it as being: a world in which irresponsibility does not "
8 " You know, people always seem overwhelmed by their lives, while You, somehow You’ve turned the tables on life, and it’s You who seem to be on top. Voilà. I don’t know else how to put it. Would You like a lemon sherbet? "
9 " thirty-year-old children who refused to act like grown-ups. "
10 " Then we’ll take the train to Paris tonight. There is a night train, isn’t there? We’ll catch it at Cannes. "
11 " What he does not yet understand is that whatever makes a woman strong is the reason that certain men will love her, even if behind her strengths there hide great weaknesses. This he will learn from You. He will learn that You are bubbly, funny, and sweet only because You have all Your weaknesses. But by then it will be too late. "
12 " As for Lucile, her first awareness of the world each morning was the sensation of being made love to, and she would find herself drifting into consciousness with a mixture of surprise, pleasure, and a vague anger at this half-rape, which deprived her of all of her traditional rituals of waking up — opening her eyes, closing them again, rejecting the new day or else welcoming it — all the confused and deliciously private little conflicts in her "
13 " She wasn’t a courtesan, nor an intellectual, nor the mother of a family — she was nothing at all. And "