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Quote by Monique Truong

“Words, do not have twins in every language. Sometimes they only have distant cousins, and sometimes they pretend that they are not even related.”

Quote by Monique Truong

Author

Monique Truong
Monique Truong

Monique Truong is a Vietnamese-American writer born on May 13, 1968. Her works are renowned for their profound depiction of the Vietnam War and its impact on individuals and families. Truong's writing includes novels, essays, and poetry, influenced by both Vietnamese culture and American literary traditions. more

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“You have certainly observed the curious fact that a given word which is perfectly clear when you hear it or use it in everyday language, and which does not give rise to any difficulty when it is engaged in the rapid movement of an ordinary sentence becomes magically embarrassing, introduces a strange resistance, frustrates any effort at definition as soon as you take it out of circulation to examine it separately and look for its meaning after taking away its instantaneous function.”

“This word "description" may be disconcerting when used to refer to what is generally called a translation. But when one wishes to render a verbal creation (as opposed to a didactic statement) from one language to another, he is confronted with two equally unsatisfactory choices. He may, according to his talents, elaborate a similar, but never identical creation, or he may describe that creation as completely as possible in his own language.”

“A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics'. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.”