Definition Untranslatable Words Quotes

Toska - noun /ˈtō-skə/ - Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness.

"No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

They had to pretend because our high-ranking politician knew not a word of English (well, when he said goodbye he did risk a "Good luck") and the high-ranking British politician knew not a word of Spanish (although she did say "Buen dίa" to me as she gave me an iron handshake). So while the former was mumbling gibberish in Spanish, inaudible to cameras and photographers, all the time keeping a broad smile trained on his guest, as if he were regaling her with interesting banter (what he said was not, however, inaudible to me: I seem to remember that he kept repeating "One, two, three, four, five, what a lovely time we're going to have"). The latter was muttering nonsense in her own language, and smiling even more broadly than him ("Cheese," she kept saying, which is what all English people being photographed are told to say, and then various untranslatable onomatopoeic words such as "Tweedle tweedle, biddle diddle, twit and fiddle, tweedle twang"). ~ Javier Marias

Mingling with the remains of the plane, equally fragmented, equally absurd, there floated the debris of the soul, broken memories, sloughed-off selves, severed mother tongues, violated privacies, untranslatable jokes, extinguished futures, lost loves, the forgotten meaning of hollow, booming words, land, belonging, home. ~ Salman Rushdie

Well, one is inspired by the whole of life, one's own and somebody else's. You know how sometimes you hear great music, and music is completely untranslatable into words, into any words. A certain tension that is born when one listens to music could aid you in expressing something absolutely different. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

Like the college professor he was, Kittredge groped only for big words, and, finding no apt ones, he coined a lot of untranslatable new ones. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Meanings are translatable. Words are untranslatable… More briefly – a word is translatable, its sound is not. ~ Marina Tsvetaeva

The history of a culture can be determined by its untranslatable words. ~ Salman Rushdie

When we unloaded the last box Vincent surprised me by taking my hand and placing a kiss on my knuckles. His deep chocolate eyes gazed into mine as he spoke with an air of knowing wisdom, "If I ever cheated on my wife I think she'd have cut my balls off. If you don't want to castrate this guy after what he's done then he's not the one for you." he nodded as though affirming the truth of his words. ~ Penny Reid

Speculative fiction by definition is geared toward an audience that wants strangeness, an audience that wants to spend time in worlds that absolutely are not like the observable world around them. ~ Orson Scott Card

He suggested a new definition of the nerd: a person who knows his own mind well enough to mistrust it. ~ Michael Lewis

Those are not hollow words, casually spoken in order to offer shallow comfort. ~ C.G. Ayling

A guy can tell a girl he's in love with her until he's blue in the face. Words don't mean anything to a woman when her head's full of doubt. You have to show her. ~ Colleen Hoover

A man may break a word with you, sir, and words are but wind;
Ay, and break it in your face, so he break it not behind. ~ William Shakespeare

You're not doing well and finally I don't have to
pretend to be so interested in your on going tragedy,

but

I'll rob the bank that gave you the impression that
money is more fruitful than words, and
I'll cut holes in the ozone if it means you have one less day of rain.
I'll walk you to the hospital,
I'll wait in a white room that reeks of hand sanitizer and latex for the results from the MRI scan that tries to
locate the malady that keeps your mind guessing, and
I want to write you a poem every day until my hand breaks
and assure you that you'll find your place,
it's just
the world has a funny way of
hiding spots fertile enough for
bodies like yours to grow roots.

and

I miss you like a dart hits the iris of a bullseye,
or a train ticket screams 4:30 at 4:47, I
wanted to tell you that it's my birthday on Thursday
and I would have wanted you to
give me the gift of your guts on the floor, one last time,
to see if you still had it in you.

I hope our ghosts aren't eating you alive.
If I'm to speak for myself, I'll tell you that
the universe is twice as big as we think it is
and you're the only one that made that idea
less devastating. ~ Lucas Regazzi

I look at words as if they were entities, sacred beings. There are words to which I tip my hat when I see them sitting on a page. ~ William Luce

Where I craved stillness in written words or in the dirt or in church, they longed to be side by side, racing and chasing and crowding each other, only able to breathe if their lungs were burning. ~ Anna Bright

While they poured their troubles into the comforting depth of his comprehending silence, he watched their faces in the soft light that shone through the spotless muslin curtains in the window, and learned more from the shadows around the eyes and the play of expression about the mouth than he did from the flow of confused words. Yet he listened attentively while he watched, quick to detect alike the hesitant truth and the glib evasion, and though he was impatient by nature, he never interrupted until the last word had been uttered. He knew how a flow of words, like a flow of blood, can wash away poison. ~ Elizabeth Goudge

There was nothing terrible about them. They had no particular power over me. No more than anyone else. It had never been them. It had always been me. This realization was like a word I had to be taught every time I heard it. The definition never seemed to sink in. They were just ordinary people. [ ... ] It used to matter so much. It used to seem like such a struggle to not turn into my father. But now, sitting here, it seemed impossible that that could've ever happened. I had wasted so much time on this. I kept finding out that the monster I'd been fighting was only me. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

Thank you," he whispered.
I smiled. He did know those words. ~ Kasie West

Later that night though, as I stayed awake into the early hours of morning devouring the second novel in a series, I understood what it meant to befriend a book. The books knew me, far better than I knew them; they knew my fears, my doubts, my dreams. They gave words to feelings I did not even realize I experienced. They listened. They consoled. They kept me company. The books gave me a life outside of my own. ~ Kelseyleigh Reber

You cannot control anything yet you can affect on everything. ~ Maliheh Sadat Razavi

Why Kisa?" I asked. "Why is it like this between us?"
Kisa dipped her eyes, not saying anything for a while, but then she smiled shyly and murmured, "Whatever our souls are made of-"
"His and mine are the same." I finished off, the words coming from some locked-away memory in my mind. ~ Tillie Cole

You will feel more responsible for your own words when you notice how your words can affect lives of other people. You will feel touched when you really see how your words have made their life so much better. Those are kind of words that make you known to the inhabitants of eternity. ~ Toba Beta

There had been a time when words had been the only place he could find solace. No book ever lost patience with him or told him to sit still. When his tutors had thrown up their hands in frustration, it was the library that had taught Nikolai military history, strategy, chemistry, astronomy. Each spine had been an open door away whispering, Come in, come in. Here is the land you've never seen before. Here is a place to hide when you're frightened, to play when you're bored, to rest when the world seems unkind. ~ Leigh Bardugo

I wanted to tell her that she was the first beautiful thing I had seen in three years. That the sight of her yawning to the back of her hand was enought to drive the breath from me. How I sometimes lost the sense of her words in the sweet fluting of her voice. I wanted to say that if she were with me then somehow nothing could ever be wrong for me again. ~ Patrick Rothfuss

It's very weird to write a song in your apartment and then realize that this random person knows all the words to it. ~ Toby Lightman

If Laura was so prolific with poems, and in truth she was, then what was the problem with Megan's request? Couldn't Laura, with a little doing, keep stringing together line after line of words and construct, in time, a novel? It seemed logical, but there was the matter of finding an idea and sustaining it. Only fire could do that. The fire of rebellion.
Mario Vargas Llosa had not used the term "fire" exactly, but rather had discussed the presence of "seditious roots" that could "dynamite the world" the writer inhabited. He claimed that writing stories was an exercise in freedom and quarreling - out-and-out rebellion, whether or not the writer was conscious of it. And this rebellion, Vargas Llosa reminded his readers, was why the Spanish Inquisition had strictly censored works of fiction, prohibiting them for three hundred years in the American colonies. ~ L.L. Barkat

Some words live in my throat
breeding like adders. Others know sun
seeking like gypsies over my tongue
to explode through my lips ~ Audre Lorde

Though she has always the words to kill and the strength to hit back. She chooses to let karma does its thing.
And sooner or later karma will show those who did her wrong and drew obstacles among her path how damn hell looks like… ~ Samiha Totanji

I'm not what anyone thinks I am. I never was. I didn't have the mouth to put it into words, to say what was wrong, to change the things I felt I needed to change. And every day it was difficult, walking around and knowing that people saw me one way, knowing that they were wrong, so completely wrong, that the real me was invisible to them. It didn't even exist to them. So: If nobody sees you, are you still there? ~ Akwaeke Emezi

This Proto-Indo-European term ghosti (from which we get the words guest, host and ghost) referred to a kind of unspoken etiquette, a notion that on seeing strangers on the horizon, rather than choose to fell them with spears or sling-shots, instead we should take the risk of welcoming them across our threshold – on the chance that they might bring new notions, new goods, fresh blood with them.

Over time this word-idea evolved into the Greek xenia – ritualised guest–host friendship, an understanding that stitched together the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds. ~ Bettany Hughes

My great-grandmother grew up in a sod house in Nebraska. When she was a tiny girl - in other words, only four human generations ago - there were still enough wild bison on the Plains that she was afraid lightning storms would spook them and they would trample her home. ~ Derrick Jensen

You will know those who love you, when you are in need. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The Resistance is a moral certainty, not a poetic one. The true poet never uses words in order to punish someone. His judgment belongs to a creative order; it is not formulated as a prophetic scripture. ~ Salvatore Quasimodo

Maybe the problem isn't everything and everyone around you, but what lies within you. ~ Dominic Riccitello

Like some kind of strange vacuum cleaner I tried to console him. I recited the same old litanies that you say to people when you try to help their broken hearts, but words can't help at all.
It's just the sound of another human voice that makes the only difference. There's nothing you're ever going to say that's going to make anybody happy when they're feeling shitty about losing somebody that they love. ~ Richard Brautigan

Do you deny the Scriptures, madame? For is it not said that a woman should be silent and have no authority over man?'
'Of course I do not deny the Scriptures, Your Majesty.'
'Yet you are on of these 'réformés,' are you not?'
She met the King's gaze. 'I am, Your Majesty. But we do not deny the Scriptures. We believe they contain all that is necessary for the service of God and our own salvation.'
He frowned. 'Yet you argue against the one true Church, is that not so?'
She picked her words with care. 'The one true Church is made up of those faithful who agree to follow the word of God. ~ Kate Forsyth

Sometimes my hand starts to burn and I am convinced we are writing the same word at the same moment. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

never wanted her to worry that his love could be swayed by a prettier face or a better offer, as if either could exist in this world. But he was not prone to flowery words and emotional speeches. He had cultivated neither, ~ Jenny Lykins

Those words ... national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture (place, language and history), the identity of an individual human being as an object for mimetic representation. ~ A.S. Byatt

By now the valley of the shadow of doubt was overrunneth with skepticism, so God became angry, so angry that God lost His temper and cursed the first humans, telling them to go forth and multiply themselves (but not in those words). But the humans took God literally and now there are six billion of them. ~ Michael Shermer