I. Frost's Selected Quotations

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Translation is the art of failure.

the cultivated person's first duty is to be always prepared to rewrite the encyclopedia

If two things don't fit, but you believe both of them, thinking that somewhere, hidden, there must be a third thing that connects them, that's credulity

For every feared thing there is an opposing hope that encourages us

Now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

There is always someone who takes ironic discourse seriously.

I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us

Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry

Whenever a poet or preacher, chief or wizard spouts gibberish, the human race spends centuries deciphering the message

A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.

The Void is not being, but not being cannot be, ergo the Void cannot be

Some things you can feel coming. You don't fall in love because you fall in love; you fall in love because of the need, desperate, to fall in love. When you feel that need, you have to watch your step: like having drunk a philter, the kind that makes you fall in love with the first thing you meet. It could be a duck-billed platypus.

The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb

Knowledge never harms. But sometimes it hurts

If two things don't fit, but you believe both of them, thinking that somewhere, hidden, there must be a third thing that connects them, that's credulity

when originals no longer exist, the last copy is the original

In the construction of Immortal Fame you need first of all a cosmic shamelessness.

There's a simple solution to every complex problem, and it's wrong

When men stop believing in God,it isn't that they then believe in nothing:they believe in everything.

Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear

Every great thinker is someone else's moron

Don't switch off your set; switch on your critical freedom.

The finest qualities lose their glow if displayed too often, and fancy travels farther than sight; even the phoenix resorts to distant habitats to keep its legend alive.

I believe that you can reach the point where there is no longer any difference between developing the habit of pretending to believe and developing the habit of believing

The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it

But the important thing is not the finding, it is the seeking, it is the devotion with which one spins the wheel of prayer and scripture, discovering the truth little by little. If this machine gave you the truth immediately, you would not recognize it, because your heart would not have been purified by the long quest.

Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.

All of us were slowly losing that intellectual light that allows you always to tell the similar from the identical, the metaphorical from the real

A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion.

What we honor as prudence in our elders is simply panic in action

Terrorism [is] a biological consequence of the multinationals, just as a day of fever is the reasonable price of an effective vaccine . . . The conflict is between great powers, not between demons and heroes. Unhappily, therefore, is the nation that finds the "heroes" underfoot, especially if they still think in religious terms and involve the population in their bloody ascent to an uninhabited paradise.

In America, intellectuals have no opinions; opinionists have no intellect

The truth is a young maiden as modest as she is beautiful, and therefore she is always seen cloaked

A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would have not written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations

The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.

I've always said that I learned the English I know through two sources -- Marvel Comics and Finnegans Wake.

Time is an eternity that stammers.

The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text.

I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed

Lying about the future produces history.

Concern with pleasing humans causes the loss of all spiritual growth

Better reality than a dream: if something is real, then it's real and you're not to blame.

Absence is to love as wind to fire; it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big.

Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth

An explanation never explains everything, but becomes part of a landscape of explanations in reciprocal relationship

Yes, I know, it's not the truth, but in a great history little truths can be altered so that the greater truth emerges

The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, ''I love you madly,'' because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, ''As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.