When he is dissected after his death," a disrespectful interpreter said of a foreign dignitary, "a million predicates will be found in his stomach: those he swallowed in the past decades without saying them.

A complicated structure? Undoubtedly. But after all, the cathedral of Milan is complicated too, and you still look at it with awe.

My motivation for learning Japanese was to translate a chemical patent, a job that I had heroically (i.e., rashly) taken on.

To look it at another way, surely there are many unfortunate people who have needed to undergo multiple stomach surgeries. Yet no one would hand a scalpel over to them and ask them to perform the same surgery they received on another person, simply because they themselves had undergone it so often.

At first, we should read with a blitheness practically bordering on superficiality; later on, with a conscientiousness close to distrust.

Language is present in a piece of writing like the sea in a single drop.

There is as little likelihood of squeezing an adult into the intellectual framework of their childhood as there is into their first pair of pajamas.