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What I look for in the classics is a message that is reinvented every time a new reader opens it. Along with the author, it is the role of the introducer and artist to make a case for that fresh take.

— Ilan Stavans Interview (2021)

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More quotes by Ilan Stavans

Immigrant life in general is miserable, as one sees in the literature produced by those who experienced the journey.

A life in two languages is a life experienced twice.

Because you live in two or three worlds doesn't mean you don't live in any of them.

Interview (1999)

Reading a classic, I believe, ought to entail an element of foreignness...Classics are windows into an epoch, not only in content but in form.

Interview (2021)

Isn’t that the dream of democracy, to allow its dwellers to have a voice? The only way to achieve that is to allow them to appreciate the voices of the past.

Interview (2021)

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Ilan Stavans (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.