Knowledge cannot go beyond life, of which it is a function. Life always remains a presupposition of knowledge, i.e., of the consciousness or knowledge contained in life. As a presupposition of knowledge itself, life is not analyzable by knowledge.
- Wilhelm Dilthey (from Dilthey by Otto Friedrich Bollnow (1967: 28-30))

"Va, midu tro, miaduwe" (Come, let us eat god, let us dance)
- what the Gorovodu voodoo worshipers in Togo, West Africa, say; in Possession, Ecstasy, and Law in Ewe Voodoo by Judy Rosenthal (1998: 246)

But just as we might garner courage to reinvent a new world and live new fictions - what a sociology that would be! - so a dvouring force comes at us from another direction, seducing us by playing on our yearing for the true real. Would that it would, would that it could, come clean, this true real. I so badly want that wink of recognition, that complicity with the nature of nature. But the more I want it, the more i realize it's not for me. Nor for you either... which leaves us is this silly and often desperate place WANTING THE IMPOSSIBLE SO BADLY that while we believe it's our rightful destiny and so act as accomplices of the real, we also know in our heart of hearts that the way we picture and talk is bound to a dense set of representational gimmicks which, to coin a phrase, have but an arbitrary relation to the slippery referent easing its way out of graspable sight.
- passage from "A Report to the Academy" in Mimesis and Alterity (1993: xvii) by Michael Taussig (emphasis mine)

In a quantum world, reality is filled with the in-between: "something standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and reality"
- by Heinsenberg, quoted by Steven Friedson in Dancing Prophets (1996: 8)

If you talk a language they are familiar with you'll communicate quickly. But in artistic matters ease of communication tends to link itself with lightness of worth. Significant depth often involves a new language.
- quoted from Strange Sounds, by Timothy Taylor (2001: 53)

The translator moves between the source language and the target language. The goal of translation is not simply to render an equivalent of an original work in a different language. Rather, it is an endeavor at re-creation, a transformative activity. In this activity, the translator is constrained by both the source language and the target language. Yet at the same time he has the opportunity to "liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work" and to break through the barriers of his own language"."
- "Translation and Transformation in Collective Action: The Environmental Movement in China" (2005: 2) by Guobin Yang, a paper presented at the American Sociological Association annual meetings, Philadelphia, PA, August 13, 2005.

Style is morality, style is truth.
- Edward Docx, author of The Calligrapher and Self Help (www.libraryjournal.com/articl...1.html)

there has to be a groove to get into. That's the hard part. Once you're into it, you don't have to keep deciding whether or not the next phrase is going to be good or not. A soloist can usually tell by the first phrase whether it's going to be a good solo. When you get into something to start with, don't worry about the rest of the set; it's going to be beautiful. If anything, just hold back, because it'll all come out eventually anyway. The important thing is getting on the right track - the right pattern - in the right way and exerting the control and practice necesssary to get it.
- by Bley, quoted by Charles Keil from "Motion and Feeling through Music" in Music Grooves (1994: 59).

!!!JOUISSANCE!!!
- Although Zizek uses "enjoyment" and other authors use "bliss" or "ecstasy," these translations tell only half the story. It is not only the extreme ecstasy that is evoked (including the orgasm of sexual fulfillment, passionate flights of romantic love, and the nirvana of the mystic). It is also the uncanny touch of that other part of the Real: anguish, existential anxiety, even sadness unto death, and (for some) the pain of torture, which situates our thinking selves on the edge of the symbolic system, in touch with the incredibility of existence itself and - always - death. "Ravishment," though still inadequate, is perhaps the closest English translation. While pleasure serves to reinforce the ego, jouissance dissolves it. As Roland Barthes instructs: "Bliss (jouissance) is unspeakable, inter-dicted. I refer to Lacan ('What one must bear in mind is that bliss is forbidden to the speaker, as such, or else that it cannot be spoken except between the lines.') and to Leclaire ('Whoever speaks, by speaking denies bliss, or correlatively, whoever experiences bliss causes the letter - and all possible speech - to collapse in the absolute degree of the annihilation he is celebrating')" (in Possession, Ecstasy and Law in Ewe Voodoo by Judy Rosenthal 1998: 249)
-　a metaphysical fulfillment of desire that goes far beyond mere satisfaction... It is a fusion of the erotic, the mystical, and the political. (in The Newly Born Woman, Introduction by S.M. Gilbert)
- an escape from gender itself, a return to a moment when there was no 'I' and specifically no 'I'm male' or 'I'm female'. We might say, in fact that this is precisely how the central experience of 'rave' works; it offers us ecstasy by liberating us from the demands of the symbolic order, the demand to be male or female, the demand to speak and understand, the demand to be anything at all. (in Discographies by J. Gilbert and E. Pearson)