The Night In Lisbon Quotes
"In danger and despair you acquire a faith in miracles; without it you would go under."
"Memory is a deadly disease for a refugee; it’s his cancer of the soul."
"The world never looks more beautiful than when you’re being locked up. When you’re about to leave it. If only we could always keep this feeling."
"Happiness is a question of degree. When you know that, you're seldom completely unhappy."
"Losses were harder to bear when you had no country of your own."
"Light was given to us as a gift from God because there is something of God in us."
"People who hang around stations always look suspicious."
"From the upper ramparts you could look across the river at the roofs and towers of the city."
"I saw lovers sitting on the benches that had been set up between the trees, offering a view of the river and the city."
"One of the players was my old self I knew so well, who trembled and was afraid and didn’t dare to reflect on his situation."
"The bells of the cathedral began to ring. I was so agitated that the vibrations literally shook me."
"It was as if I were standing in a room with facing mirrors; they cast my reflection back and forth in an infinity of empty space."
"I heard the woman laughing behind me, and I’ve never forgotten the soft, rather contemptuous, commiserating laugh of that unknown woman."
"Denunciation was looked upon as a national virtue by the saviors of Germany."
"The wind had risen again, and the swaying branches cast their restless shadows on the faces, the howling machine, and the silent stone sculptures on the church wall."
"It was not far. In Krahnstrasse a company of marching soldiers passed me. They were singing a song I did not know."
"It makes no difference whether the slogans come from the right or the left, as long as they relieve the masses of the hard work of thinking and of the need to take responsibility."
"In the darkness of night had frightened me—now it was the light that I feared."
"The existence of a refugee. Or a Buddhist mendicant monk. Or modern man."
"What comfort there is in the skin of someone you love! How much more intelligent it is than the mouth with its lies!"
"There are moments of danger when you feel hot and dry inside, as though the slightest spark would set you on fire."
"Fear of the unknown isn't the same as fear of something you know."
"Our memory falsifies things to help us survive. It glosses over the unbearable parts of the past."
"Time is diluted death, a poison administered slowly, in harmless doses."
"The only way is to know that we can't hold it, and stop trying to. We frighten it away with our clumsy hands."
"Danger increases our awareness of life. Perfect as long as the danger doesn’t come too close."
"A man or his reflection in the mirror? A living human being or his memory, his image shorn of grief?"
"But if we can keep our hands off it, won't it go on living fearlessly behind our eyes? Won't it stay there as long as our eyes live?"
"Maybe life is nothing more than a beam of light passing slowly over our changing faces."
"The past became a mirror that reflected nothing but us."
"Usually the past is just a depressing reflection of the years; but our past became a mirror that reflected nothing but us."
"We were no longer at the mercy of the past; it belonged to us."
"The decision to break away and the act of breaking away removed us so radically from everything that had gone before that the impossible happened: we were reborn."
"Happiness! How its colors run in your memory! Like cheap shirts in the laundry."
"When your world is brimful of feeling, there's no room for time."
"What's left is in here, pointing to his head. And even in my mind, it's no safer than a dress in a closet full of moths."
"Memory is an animal that lives and eats and digests. It consumes itself like the phoenix in the legend, so that we can go on living and not be destroyed by it."
"I'll always be with you. Even if we're separated for a little while, I'll always find you."
"Everything's a comfort, as long as we live, everything is comforting, didn't you know that?"
"In this century innocence is the worst crime and that the innocent are always punished the most severely."
"Once you discard the idea of justice, it's not so hard to take the whole business as an adventure."
"Life is still outside, but at least it exists again."
"Heartbreak can kill you as easily as dysentery, and justice was a peacetime luxury."
"The energy you spent on them would detract from your will to survive—so you block it off."
"We’re always looking for Him. But we look for Him as if we were trying to swim with all our clothes on and a full field pack."
"The glorious smell of the old cognac and the succulent pâté hovered around Helen like an aura of happiness."
"When you're entirely dependent on another man, you get to be a psychologist, even if you're so frightened you can hardly breathe."
"Fear and caution are separate functions, the one doesn't interfere with the other."
"The most fascinating man is a bore without that quality of unpredictability."
"The notion of time faded away. It still terrified us to think how little time we had ahead of us, but our fear became as transparent as glass."
"Loneliness demands a companion and does not ask who it is."
"In the silence of night, we are the loudest, echoing our deepest fears and greatest hopes in the theater of our minds."
"I understood the terrible forlornness that our skin imposes on us, the gulf that can never be bridged."
"Everyone has several people inside him, all different. And sometimes one of them becomes independent and takes over for a while."
"Perhaps she had never belonged to me; who, after all, belongs to whom, and what is it to belong to someone, to belong to one another?"
"We are living in an age of paradoxes. To preserve peace, we wage war."
"Outside, no one knew of her sickness. Outside, she was not a patient, but a woman."
"We seemed to be in a port, sheltered from every wind."
"It was only when I saw that nothing was damaged apart from the mirrors and the dress that I understood."
"Why do we make so much fuss about things which at best are merely lent us for a little while; and why all this talk about degrees of possession, when the illusory word 'possess' means merely to embrace the air?"
"The whole thing struck him as too funny for words; he was best man at our second wedding. A week later we were divorced in Mexico."
"I often thought of Helen, whom I had only seen dead, and for a time, when I was living alone, I even dreamed of her."