Dogs are very different from cats in that they can be images of human virtue. They are like us.

Every human soul has seen, perhaps before their birth, pure forms such as justice, temperance, beauty and all the great moral qualities which we hold in honour. We are moved towards what is good by the faint memory of these forms, simple and calm and blessed, which we saw once in a pure, clear light, being pure ourselves.

Most real relationships are involuntary.

for most of us the space between 'dreaming on things to come' and 'it is too late, it is all over' is too tiny to enter.

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.

Then I felt too that I might take this opportunity to tie up a few loose ends, only of course loose ends can never be properly tied, one is always producing new ones. Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgements on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.

I just enjoy translating, it's like opening one's mouth and hearing someone else's voice emerge.