"Untranslatable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... tragedy winds up—"Ahi! lagrime; Ahi! dolore"—the words appropriately carved upon his tombstone at St. Onofrio—is unspeakably pathetic. It is his own dirge, the cry of a heart whose strings are about to break. It is as untranslatable as the sigh of the wind in a pine forest. If the words are changed, the spell is lost, and the way to the heart ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... find nothing fit to eat. The English cannot cook. Because he can find no noisy, clattering, dish-smashing restaurant, full of acrobatic waiters racing and balancing under immense piles of plates, and shouting jargon untranslatable, unintelligible and unpronounceable down into the lower kitchen, he ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... gentleman," echoed Shirley, lifting her head with glad grace. She checked herself. Words seemed crowding to her tongue. She would not give them utterance; but her look spoke much at the moment. What, Yorke tried to read, but could not. The language was there, visible, but untranslatable—a poem, a fervid lyric, in an unknown tongue. It was not a plain story, however, no simple gush of feeling, no ordinary love-confession—that was obvious. It was something other, deeper, more intricate ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... a term, one Latin and one Greek. It was the Greek that we feared most. Mellish had a sort of genius for picking out absolutely untranslatable passages, and desiring us (in print) to render the same with full notes. This term the book had been Thucydides, Book II, with regard to which I may echo the words of a certain critic when called upon to give his candid opinion of a friend's first novel, ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... high loyalty.'" Mr. Swift was as baffled as Tom. He studied the message for several minutes. It seemed highly unlikely that the electronic brain had made an error in decoding. Any new or untranslatable symbol caused a red light to flash on ...
— Tom Swift and The Visitor from Planet X • Victor Appleton
... part, a part directly and explicitly occupied with teaching; and this divides into two great sections, α, A system of ethics so absolutely new as to be untranslatable[Footnote: This is not generally perceived. On the contrary, people are ready to say, 'Why, so far from it, the very earliest language in which the Gospels appeared, excepting only St. Matthew's, was the Greek.' Yes, reader; but what Greek? Had not the Greeks been, for a long time, colonizing Syria ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... entertainment. Yet the old man smiled, the mother beat time with her heavy foot, and nodded at her husband with pride in their daughter's accomplishment. And again in the throng the ill-conditioned talk, the untranslatable jests of the Arabs and the negroes went their round. It was horrible, don't ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason |
