Paraphrase Quotes
More Paraphrase Quotes
The generation of an infinite number of bogusly 'objective' sentences in an English of agonizing patchwork mediocrity is no cause for celebration, even if it eventually amounts to a Borgesian paraphrase of our entire universe. [...] I liked the internet better before. The mistakes had flavor, passion, transparent purpose.
— Jonathan Lethem, "All-Star Thinkers on Wikipedia's 10th Anniversary", The Atlantic, 13 January 2011
The paraphrase by Dash appears to be the origin of later popularly attributed variants, e.g.:
edna st. vincent millay— It is not true that life is one damn thing after another. It's the same damn thing over and over.As attributed without citation in Psychoanalysis Today: A Case Book (1991) by Elizabeth Thorne and Shirley Herscovitch Schaye, p. 93
Variant translation of Inventas aut qui vitam excoluere per artis : "It is of benefit to have improved life through discovered knowledge "; a paraphrase of this is inscribed on the Medicine and Physiology Nobel prize medals: Inventas vitam iuvat excoluisse per artes ("inventions enhance life which is beautified through art").
— The souls that throng the flood
Are those to whom, by Fate, are other bodies owed,
In Lethe's lake they long oblivion taste,
Of future life secure, forgetful of the past.
— Lines 713–715 (translated by John Dryden).
The soul in paraphrase.
George Herbert— 'Prayer (1)', collected in The Temple, Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations (published posthumously,1633).
Better mendacities Than the classics in paraphrase!
— 1920 Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, pt.2.
The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.
vladimir nabokov— Problems of translation (1955)
The rhetorical power of the narratives is obviously lost by means of propositional paraphrase, as is a portion of their meaning.
— Craig Blomberg as cited in: David B. Gowler (2000, p. 98)
