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Night Train to Lisbon

Pascal Mercier

Top 10 Best Quotes

“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.”

“A feeling is no longer the same when it comes the second time. It dies through the awareness of its return. We become tired and weary of our feelings when they come too often and last too long.”

“Life is not what we live; it is what we imagine we are living.”

“In the years afterward, I fled whenever somebody began to understand me. That has subsided. But one thing remained: I don't want anybody to understand me completely. I want to go through life unknown. The blindness of others is my safety and my freedom.”

“Given that we can live only a small part of what there is in us -- what happens with the rest?”

“SOLIDAO, LONELINESS. What is it that we call loneliness. It can't simply be the absence of others, you can be alone and not lonely, and you can be among people and yet be lonely. So what is it? ... it isn't only that others are there, that they fill up the space next to us. But even when they celebrate us or give advice in a friendly conversation, clever, sensitive advice: even then we can be lonely. So loneliness is not something simply connected with the presence of others or with what they do. Then what? What on earth?”

“Sometimes, we are afraid of something because we're afraid of something else. ”

“To understand yourself: Is that a discovery or a creation?”

“To live for the moment: it sounds so right and so beautiful. But the more I want to, the less I understand what it means.”

“Human beings can't bear silence. It would mean that they would bear themselves.”

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Book Keywords:

carpe-diem, emotions, identity, honesty, understanding, home, past, silence, self-awareness, illusions, self-image, character, life, leaving, personality, self-knowledge, self-deception, fulfillment, perception, feelings, moving-on, travel

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