Multilingualism Quote by Abraham Verghese

“Those who have not learned to read the ancient classics in the language in which they were written must have a very imperfect knowledge…

— Henry David Thoreau

“All I require of a translator is that he or she be a more gifted writer than I am, and in at least two…

— Kurt Vonnegut

“I love the writers of my thousand books. It pleases me to think how astonished old Homer, whoever he was, would be to find…

— Marilynne Robinson

“Not everyone who knows how to write can be a writer. Not everyone who knows two languages can be a translator.”

— Nataly Kelly

“To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader…

— Henry David Thoreau

“The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and…

— Henry David Thoreau

“She began to whisper something in my ear. It’s the strangest thing about poetry—you can tell it’s poetry, even if you don’t speak the…

— Neil Gaiman

It is my experience that the short path to the simple and precise English needed by a man of science lies thorough the tongues…

— Henry Crew

“I liked to call myself a poet and had affected a habit of reading classical texts (in translation, of course – I was a…

— Mary Karr

“One ought to know everything, to write. All of us scribblers are monstrously ignorant. If only we weren’t lacking in stamina, what a rich…

— Gustave Flaubert

“As a writer, one spends a lifetime journeying into the heart of language, trying to minimize, if not eliminate, the distance between language and…

— Arundhati Roy

“I believe that to be an efficient writer, one must be able to write in more than one language. I know over seven languages.…

— Mitta Xinindlu