Karl Kraus Quotes

When you visit a foreign city you are in it, but not of it, separated by a glass wall. Once, while a student, I was getting dressed in my ground-floor room when a family of Italians crossed the grass to watch, as if I were laid on for their amusement and instruction.

I had to struggle with the language. I can understand Hindi now, but I still can't communicate. And things get lost in translation; I feel rejected all the time.

In Italy, you're in your comfort zone when it comes to language, lifestyle, your habits and preparations, and moving abroad is not easy. It's not easy to carry over your own ideas about football, your own methods. You have to get everything across in a different language, and that wastes a lot of energy.

An ancient father says that a dog we know is better company than a man whose language we do not understand.

I bought a new Japanese car, I turned on the radio ... I don't understand a word they're saying.

You can mean more than one. You can mean thousands. I'm not in any immediate danger, I'll say to you. I'll pretend you can hear me. But it's no good, because I know you can't.

People say strange things, the boy thought. Sometimes it's better to be with the sheep, who don't say anything. And better still to be alone with one's books. They tell their incredible stories at the time when you want to hear them. But when you're talking to people, they say some things that are so strange that you don't know how to continue the conversation.

When somebody says something I don't agree with, I say I'd rather not. It comes to the point where that is the strongest form of resistance. As a Mexican, it took me a long while to learn one word in English, "no". And that is the one word we have in common.

I want to be understood by my country, but if I fail to be understood - what then?, I shall pass through my native land to one side, like a shower of slanting rain.

I know how hard it can be to communicate in a different country, find your way around, and deal with the mentality of other people and different cultures.

In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.

Nothing echoes like an empty mailbox.

Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.

It's easier to love a woman when you can't understand a word she's saying.

I can't even spell spaghetti never mind talk Italian. How could I tell an Italian to get the ball - he might grab mine.

In an instant he became aware that the tourist was about to try his own peculiar brand of linguistics, which meant that he would speak loudly and slowly in his own language.

One of them, for example, which will probably haunt me more than any other is the problem of communication.

Is it O.K. that I speak in English? The only thing I know in Dutch is how to order pot.

What I find trying in a country which you do not understand and where you cannot speak, is that you can never be yourself.

Some words have multiple meanings. Scholastic, aware that I'm allergic to preservatives, kindly got someone to translate the phrase "I can only eat food without preservatives" into Italian. They warned me, however, as they taught me how to say it, that the Italian word for "preservatives" is the same as the word for "condom." So that I should be careful how I look when I say it.

My wife spoke perfect Italian and she was very beautiful and very suave Italian men were crowding around her, talking all the time and if I was to even understand what was going on, I had to learn the language fast.

The French just said he was a damned nuisance. Or they would have had they the good fortune to speak English. Instead being French they were forced to say it in their own language.

One of the hardest things in the world is to convey a meaning accurately from one mind to another.

Seriously, you don't have to know English. It'd be nice, a nice little plus. We don't want miracles. You don't have to know the country's language. But just some shapes, that's all. A square. A little geometry.

Everyone, he went on, speaks a language he does not understand, but which now and then is understood by others. That is enough to permit one to exist and at least to be misunderstood.