Austerlitz Quotes
"It is often our mightiest projects that most obviously betray the degree of our insecurity."
"In the practice of warfare, the largest fortifications will naturally attract the largest enemy forces."
"No one in his right mind could truthfully say that he liked a vast edifice such as the Palace of Justice."
"Our best-laid plans always turn into the exact opposite when they are put into practice."
"The history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on."
"Everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself."
"At first glance they seemed to be normal people, but when you looked more closely their faces would blur or flicker slightly at the edges."
"The mere mention of the name 'Prague' impels Austerlitz to the Czech capital, where he eventually discovers his old nanny."
"Domestic buildings of less than normal size are those that offer us at least a semblance of peace."
"I always feel particularly apprehensive on the last stretch of the journey."
"As far as I remember I wrote to Austerlitz from Munich a couple of times, but I never had any reply to my letters."
"It was a circle of this kind with an indistinct outline that Zdeněk Gregor drew on a piece of paper to illustrate the extent of the gray area in my right eye."
"Oddly enough, as he stood in front of this attractive motif with Pereira that afternoon he had been thinking of our encounters in Belgium, so long ago now."
"Since my childhood and youth, I have never known who I really was."
"It hasn’t been easy to make my way out of my own inhibitions."
"Even today I still sometimes dream that one of those locked doors opens and I step through it, into a friendlier, more familiar world."
"Several of the rooms that were not locked were unused too."
"I know that I often lay awake for hours in my narrow bed."
"Such comfort made it all the worse to wake up early in the morning."
"Only recently have I recalled how oppressed I felt."
"And just as cold reigned in the house in Bala, so did silence."
"The minister himself, on the other hand, was in a comparatively jovial mood."
"Before evening prayers he went to his rolltop desk."
"For the most part, of course, these Sunday sermons, and I must have heard over five hundred of them, went over my head."
"In my memory Calvinist eschatology is linked not so much to these biblical images of destruction."
"But on another day, when we had just reached the Pennant pass."
"I remember, said Austerlitz, how we were once driving through the endless Tanat valley."
"It was only a few days ago that, thinking over that experience of liberation."
"The manse was always freezing, Austerlitz continued, not just in winter."
"I once found her sitting on a chair in one of the half-empty rooms upstairs."
"He never wrote any of these sermons down, but worked them out in his head."
"I don’t remember exactly how the rest of that day passed after she died."
"Grief is not the right word for the condition into which he had fallen."
"This memento, worth nothing in itself, is still in my possession, said Austerlitz. It means more to me than almost any other picture."
"Gerald felt as isolated as I did, said Austerlitz."
"In my photographic work I was always especially entranced by the moment when the shadows of reality, so to speak, emerge out of nothing."
"The greatest exotic attractions of Andromeda Lodge were the white cockatoos."
"Adela had once told him, said Austerlitz, that the transformation of Andromeda Lodge into a kind of natural history museum had begun in 1869."
"All mankind’s misfortunes were connected with its departure at some point in time from [a] norm, and with the slightly feverish, overheated condition in which we constantly found ourselves."
"It was impossible for me then to go and see any of my friends, who were not numerous in any case, or mix with other people in any normal way."
"I have never owned a clock of any kind, a bedside alarm or a pocket watch, let alone a wristwatch."
"I must go to the third-floor landing of a certain building in Great Portland Street, where I had once had a strange turn after visiting a doctor’s surgery, and throw myself over the banisters into the dark depths of the stairwell."
"I was increasingly overcome by a sense of aversion and distaste, said Austerlitz, at the mere thought of opening the bundles of papers and looking through the endless reams I had written in the course of the years."
"We take almost all the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious."
"Memories like this came back to me in the disused Ladies’ Waiting Room of Liverpool Street Station, memories behind and within which many things much further back in the past seemed to lie."
"I realized then, he said, how little practice I had in using my memory, and conversely how hard I must always have tried to recollect as little as possible."
"I knew nothing about the conquest of Europe by the Germans and the slave state they set up, and nothing about the persecution I had escaped."
"The entire structure of language, the syntactical arrangement of parts of speech, punctuation, conjunctions, and finally even the nouns denoting ordinary objects were all enveloped in impenetrable fog."
"I have no idea how long I stood in the waiting room, said Austerlitz, nor how I got out again and which way I walked back."
"It was a nightmarish, never-ending dream, with its main plot interrupted several times by other episodes."
"As for me, said Austerlitz, I felt at this time as if the dead were returning from their exile and filling the twilight around me with their strangely slow but incessant to-ing and fro-ing."
"I often lie here until late in the evening, feeling time roll back, said Austerlitz."
"All I do know is that when I saw the boy sitting on the bench I became aware, through my dull bemusement, of the destructive effect on me of my desolation through all those past years."
"I felt as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry."
"The idea that time could form any kind of pattern was beyond my comprehension."
"Memories reveal themselves not by means of mental effort but through our senses, long numbed and now coming back to life."
"When memories come back to you, you sometimes feel as if you were looking at the past through a glass mountain."
"I often saw them weaving their erratic way far out in the air, and wished I were already in their company."
"As far back as I can remember, I have always felt as if I had no place in reality, as if I were not there at all."
"I think it was in the late autumn of 1941, that Agáta had to take her wireless, her gramophone and the records she loved so much, her binoculars and opera glasses, musical instruments, jewelry, furs, and the clothes Maximilian had left behind to the so-called Compulsory Collection Center."
"They stayed in this cold Trade Fair building for several days, until finally, early one morning when scarcely anyone was out and about, they were marched under guard to nearby Holešovice railway station."
"What was the meaning of the festive white lace tablecloth hanging over the back of the ottoman, and the armchair with its worn brocade cover?"
"They were all as timeless as that moment of rescue, perpetuated but forever just occurring."
"I understood it all now, yet I did not understand it."
"Every new view that opened out before us looked to me both familiar and utterly alien."
"In the end, we are all like a pool of frozen water, appearing still yet beneath the surface, so much is moving."
"History is like a series of echoes, calling back to one another through the corridors of time."
"Sometimes, the most significant journeys are the ones that take us back through our past."
"Memories, once thought lost, can sometimes flood back in the most unexpected ways."
"The past never leaves us, it merely waits for a moment to make its presence known again."
"In our search for understanding, we often find more questions than answers."
"Time does not heal all wounds; it merely places them out of sight."
"It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last."
"For instance, if I am walking through the city and look into one of those quiet courtyards where nothing has changed for decades, I feel, almost physically, the current of time slowing down in the gravitational field of oblivion."
"Might it not be that we also have appointments to keep in the past, in what has gone before and is for the most part extinguished?"
"Among the children of these forebears who had moved from Germany to the French capital were Adolphe and Alfonse, together with Jeanne and Pauline, who had brought Messrs. Lanzberg and Ochs into the family as sons-in-law."
"And might it not be, continued Austerlitz, that we also have appointments to keep in the past, in what has gone before and is for the most part extinguished, and must go there in search of places and people who have some connection with us on the far side of time, so to speak?"
"What, I wondered, are twelve or thirteen such years, if not a single moment of unalterable pain?"
"Sometimes they manifested themselves in one of the dark catacombs where, covered in frayed and dusty plumage, they were crouching on the stony floor and, turning silently towards one another, made digging motions with their earth-stained hands."
"In the weeks following my visit to the museum of veterinary science, I was unable to recall any of what I have just told you, for it was in the Métro on my way back from Maisons-Alfort that I had the first of the several fainting fits I was to suffer, causing temporary but complete loss of memory."
"For the most part the valuables, the bank deposits, the shares and the houses and business premises ruthlessly seized at the time, said Lemoine, remain in the hands of the city and the state to this day."
"I think that this film, which I saw only once but which assumed ever more monstrous and fantastic dimensions in my imagination, was entitled Toute la mémoire du monde and was made by Alain Resnais."