The Night in Lisbon
Erich Maria Remarque
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Strange how complicated we can make things just to avoid showing what we feel!”
“What comfort there is in the skin of someone you love!”
“Some day perhaps our time will be known as the age of irony. Not the witty irony of the eighteenth century, but the stupid or malignant irony of a crude age of technological progress and cultural regression.”
“By day Lisbon has a naive theatrical quality that enchants and captivates, but by night it is a fairy-tale city, descending over lighted terraces to the sea, like a woman in festive garments going down to meet her dark lover.”
“There’s something good about unpleasant memories: they make you think you’re happy when a moment before you were convinced of the contrary.”
“People tend to ask too many questions in love,and once you begin really wanting to know the answers,love is on its way out.”
“I had found a woman whom I had not known, and who from day to day had grown stranger to me, yet closer. Now she seemed to be slipping away from me again, into a realm where all names are forgotten, where there is only darkness and perhaps certain unknown laws of darkness. She rejected that dark realm; she came back, but she no longer belonged to me as I had tried to believe. 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? Isn't it a forlorn illusion, a convention? Time and again she turned back, as she called it, for an hour, for the duration of a glance, for a night. And always I felt like a bookkeeper who is not allowed to audit. I could only accept without question whatever this unaccountable, unhappy, damned, and beloved creature chose to be and to tell me. ... Loneliness demands a companion and does not ask who it is. If you don't know that, you may have been alone, but you were never lonely.”
“There's something good about unpleasant memories: they make you think you are happy when a moment before you were convinced of the contrary. Happiness is a question of degree. When you know that, you are seldom completely unhappy.”
“The scene struck me as typical of the sinister, demonic mob spirit of our times, of all the frightened, hysterical crowds who follow slogans. 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.”
“Now I wanted only one thing, in this room with the smell of Helen's perfume and clothes and the bed and the twilight: to possess her with everything that was in me, and if there was one thing that tormented me and pierced the flat dull sense of loss, it was the realization that nature wouldn't let me possess her even more fully and deeply. If only I could spread myself over her like a blanket, if only I could have had a thousand hands and mouths, if only I could have held her in a perfect concave mold, skin to skin without intervening space—but even then there would be a last regret, for still it would be only skin to skin instead of blood in blood: we could be together, but never completely united.”
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Book Keywords:
growing-apart, distancing-self, love, complicated, strange, illusion, obsession, passion, closeness, slipping-away, forgetting, knowing-someone, lisbon, rejection, companionship, feeling, loneliness, skin, comfort
