Night Train To Lisbon Quotes
"It is a mistake to believe that the decisive moments of a life when its direction changes forever must be marked by loud and dramatics. The dramatic moments of a life-determining experience are often unbelievably low-key."
"For as long as possible, his eyes clung to the last houses of the city. When they had finally and irrevocably disappeared from view, he started writing down the names of the students he had taught over the years."
"Given that we can live only a small part of what there is in us – what happens to the rest?"
"Words in golden silence. When I read a newspaper, listen to the radio, or overhear what people are saying in the café, I often feel an aversion, even disgust at the same words written and spoken over and over."
"The problem is, we have no grasp of our life as a whole. Neither forward nor backward. If something goes well, we just attribute it to good luck."
"Silent nobility. It is extraordinary, but the answer changes in me with the light that falls on the city and the Tagus."
"Paradoxical yearning. For 1,922 days I attended the Liceu where my father sent me. By the third day, I realized that I had to count the days so as not to be crushed by them."
"Joyless and pale, my assiduous benchmate took his and held it in his folded hands like a Bible."
"What could, what should, be done with all the time that lay before us, open and unshaped, feather-light in its freedom and lead-heavy in its uncertainty?"
"Time came to a halt and held its breath, as it never did again."
"Neither before nor since have I experienced anything that revealed so cogently and impressively as the following scene how different people are."
"Can there be anything more absurd than this: to be moved by a wish that has no conceivable object?"
"When dictatorship is a fact, revolution is a duty."
"The real director of our life is accident – a director full of cruelty, compassion and bewitching charm."
"Isn’t every exchange of looks between people like the ghostly brief meeting of eyes between travellers passing one another, intoxicated by the inhuman speed and the shock of air pressure that makes everything shudder and clatter?"
"The fields are greener in description than in their greenness."
"People said to Gregorius that he went through the world in a posture, as if he were always bent over a book and constantly reading it."
"How well one sees depends on so many things."
"NADA. NOTHING. Aneurysm. Every moment can be the last."
"Is it possible that the best way to be sure of yourself was to know and understand someone else?"
"How could curiosity about another life coexist with the awareness that your own time was running out?"
"The world that demands love of tyrants, slavemasters, and cutthroats, whether their brutal boot steps reverberate through the streets with a deafening echo or they slink with feline silence like cowardly shadows through the streets and pierce their victims in the heart with flashing steel."
"I revere the word of God for I love its poetic force. I loathe the word of God for I hate its cruelty."
"The poetry of the divine words is so overwhelming that it silences everything and every protest becomes wretched yapping."
"How are we to be happy without curiosity, without questions, doubt and arguments? Without joy in thinking?"
"In His omnipresence, the Lord observes us day and night, every hour, every minute, every second, He keeps a ledger of our acts and thoughts, He never lets us alone, never spares us a moment completely to ourselves."
"It is death that gives the moment its beauty and its horror. Only through death is time a living time."
"I would not like to live in a world without cathedrals. I need the lustre of their windows, their cool stillness, their imperious silence."
"Life is not what we live; it is what we imagine we are living."
"Books mustn’t cost anything, that’s what I thought then and still do."
"The pure extravagance. My vengeance for the poverty I grew up in."
"To play against Natalie had been strange and weird, for she played without pieces and without light."
"Gregorius had never heard such an admission from him, and he was scared."
"The humiliation when you feel you’re going to shit your pants."
"Disappointment is considered bad. A thoughtless prejudice."
"We shouldn’t suffer disappointment sighing at something our lives would be better without."
"One who would really like to know himself would have to be a restless, fanatical collector of disappointments."
"Knowledge of mortality capers around us like a brittle paper ribbon that barely touches our skin."
"How, if not through disappointment, should we discover what we have expected and hoped for?"
"The universe is simply there, and it’s completely indifferent, really completely indifferent to what happens to us."
"Why do we feel sorry for people who can’t travel? Because, unable to expand externally, they are not able to expand internally either."
"We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place; we stay there, even though we go away."
"And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there."
"It is an error, a nonsensical act of violence, when we concentrate on the here and now with the conviction of thus grasping the essential."
"What matters is to move surely and calmly, with the appropriate humour and the appropriate melancholy, into the temporally and spatially expanded internal landscape that we are."
"Kitsch is the most misleading of all prisons. The bars are covered with the gold of simplistic, unreal feelings so that you mistake them for the pillars of a palace."
"The soul, Jorge, is a pure invention, our most brilliant invention, and its brilliance resides in the suggestion, the overwhelmingly plausible suggestion, that there is something in the soul to be discovered as in a real part of the world."
"I lie next to her, I hear her breathe, I feel her warmth – and am horribly lonely."
"Loneliness through ostracism, that was what had preoccupied Prado at the end."
"Once the intellectual argument became bitter and deadly serious. But it’s none of your business, it’s nobody’s business."
"Everything is much more complicated. The further one goes, the more complicated it becomes."
"If there were poetic thinking and thinking poetry – that would be paradise."
"I think they were an attempt to pave the way to this paradise."
"‘You’re fooling yourself," he said to me. "You want it for another reason than the one you’ve fabricated for yourself.’"
"I had simply believed we could talk about everything that came into our minds. Everything. Romantic. Damned romantic, I know. But that’s how it was between us for more than forty years."
"He was the one who taught me this liberating difference."
"Loneliness through the need to conceal, there's that too."
"Among all these unexpressed experiences are those that are hidden and that have given our life its shape, its color, and its melody."
"Reflecting on what you may really want. The awareness of limited, ephemeral time as a source of strength."
"Don't waste your time, do something worthwhile with it."
"The awareness of impending death... opens the way out and wakes us to the present."
"To understand yourself: is that a discovery or a creation?"
"Is anyone really interested in me, and not only in his interest in me?"
"The wishes of others: What do we do with them when they strike us?"
"To lose your dignity, you had to forfeit yourself."
"Saving a life is a burden nobody can bear, neither the life-saver nor the one who is saved."
"Memory is overheated, I’m breathlessly busy retrospectively assembling the fleeting images of the event into an illusion of something intelligible."
"Sometimes I get a visit in the compartment... Usually the visit comes at the wrong time."
"What can it mean to train ourselves in anger and imagine that we take advantage of its knowledge without being addicted to its poison?"
"A single word among words, a single phrase among phrases: they were untouchable, absolutely untouchable by the mass of blind, wordless water."
"Saying goodbye is something that only you can do, but it means subjecting yourself to the scrutiny of the other."
"Intimacy, it is fleeting and deceptive as a mirage."
"The fear that life remained incomplete, a torso; the awareness of no longer being able to become the one we aimed to be."
"You mustn’t make others into the building blocks of your own life, into water bearers in the race for your own bliss."
"The blindness of others is my safety and my freedom."
"Looks are only meaningful when they are interpreted. Only then do they exist."
"We are sluggish creatures who need familiarity. Curiosity as a rare luxury on home ground."
"No one is destined for another. Not only because there is no Providence and no one else who could arrange it."
"Life is not what we live; it is what we imagine living."