Lisbon Story Quotes

But when we set out to understand somebody’s inside? Is that a trip that ever ends? Is the soul a place of facts? Or are the alleged facts only the deceptive shadows of our stories?

AS SOMBRAS DA ALMA. THE SHADOWS OF THE SOUL. The stories others tell about you and the stories you tell about yourself: which come closer to the truth? Is it so clear that they are your own? Is one an authority on oneself? But that isn't the question that concerns me. The real question is: In such stories, is there really a difference between true and false? In stories about the outside, surely. But when we set out to understand someone on the inside? Is that a trip that ever comes to an end? Is the soul a place of facts? Or are the alleged facts only the deceptive shadows of our stories?

But what I’m thinking as I look at these cities is how I would love to go to a place where nobody knows my name, where nobody expects anything of me. Who would I be in Lisbon? Or San Francisco? I would have no mother there, no stepfather, no one to disappoint. I could even die without hurting anybody but myself.

So-called real life has only once interfered with me, and it had been a far cry from what the words, lines, books had prepared me for. Fate had to do with blind seers, oracles, choruses announcing death, not with panting next to the refrigerator, fumbling with condoms, waiting in a Honda parked round the corner and surreptitious encounters in a Lisbon hotel. Only the written word exists, everything one must do oneself is without form, subject to contingency without rhyme or reason. It takes too long. And if it ends badly the metre isn't right, and there's no way to cross things out.

Other than when I got the news about Mom, I can only remember one other time when I cried as an adult, and that was when I read the story of the janitor’s father. I was sitting alone in the teachers’ room at Lisbon High School, working my way through a stack of themes that my Adult English class had written.

This is the story of a boy named Pete Coutinho, who had a spell put on him. Some people might have called it a curse. I don't know. It depends on a lot of things, on whether you've got gipsy blood, like old Beatriz Sousa, who learned a lot about magic from the wild gitana tribe in the mountains beyond Lisbon, and whether you're satisfied with a fisherman's life in Cabrillo. Not that a fisherman's life is a bad one, far from it. By day you go out in the boats that rock smoothly across the blue Gulf waters, and at night you can listen to music and drink wine at the Shore Haven or the Castle or any of the other taverns on Front Street. What more do you want? What more is there? And what does any sensible man, or any sensible boy, want with that sorcerous sort of glamor that can make everything incredibly bright and shining, deepening colors till they hurt, while wild music swings down from stars that have turned strange and alive? Pete shouldn't have wanted that, I suppose, but he did, and probably that's why there happened to him - what did happen. And the trouble began long before the actual magic started working. ("Before I Wake...")

In 1936, shortly after the first lobotomies were performed in Lisbon, the procedure came to our side of the sea, where it was adapted with all-American vigor, so much so that by the late 1950s, more than twenty thousand patients had had lobotomies and the surgery was being used to “cure” everything from mental retardation to homosexuality to criminal insanity.

...I am sitting on the wall of the castle, looking out over the city, the river, the dish of sea beyond. Oleander, frangipani, laurel, great elm trees. A girl is sitting nearby, writing. The word "goodbye" is drifting in the air around me and I can't seem to catch hold of it. This entire city is a goodbye. The fringe of Europe, the last shore of the first world, it is there that the corroded continent sinks into the sea, dissolves into the infinite mist which the ocean resembles today. This city does not belong to the present, it is earlier here because it is later. The banal has not yet arrived. Lisbon is reluctant. That must be the word, this city puts off the moment of parting, this is where Europe says goodbye to itself. Lethargic songs, gentle decay, great beauty. Memory, postponement of metamorphosis. Not one of those things would find its way into Dr Strabo's Travel Guide. I send the fools to the fado taverns, for their dose of processed saudade. Slauerhoff and Pessoa I keep to myself...

In 1469, the regions of Aragon (Aragón) and Castile (Castilla) were united by the marriage of Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella I, thus creating España or Spain. The treasury of this fledgling nation had been depleted by the many battles they had waged against the Moors. The Spanish monarchs, seeing Portugal’s economic success, sought to establish their own trade routes to the Far East. Queen Isabella embraced this concept from the religious standpoint of going out into “all the world” and converting the pagan people of Asia to Christianity. At the same time, a tall, young, middle-class man, said to have come from Genoa, Italy, who held that his father was a fabric weaver and cheese merchant, sought to become a navigator. As such, Columbus sailed to Portugal where pirates allegedly attacked the ship he was on. Fortunately, he managed to swim ashore and joined his brother Bartholomew as a cartographer in Lisbon. Apparently to him, becoming a mapmaker must have seemed boring when there was a world to explore. Returning to the sea, he sailed to places as far away as Iceland to the north, and ventured south as far as Guinea on the West-African coast. It is reasonable to assume that he had heard or perhaps even read the stories about the Vikings that took place almost five hundred years prior to Columbus’ arriving there.

What ridiculous stories! We are stratified creatures, creatures full of abysses, with a soul of inconstant quicksilver, with a mind whose color and shape change as in a kaleidoscope that is constantly shaken.

Gradually, the generals and several others, notably Secretary of State Tillerson, would communicate and share strategies for how to manage the sometimes challenging, sometimes downright irrational requests that would come out of the White House. Kori Schake described it this way: “I think what the people, particularly in the Pentagon, did was try and explain to the president and his top aides why things weren’t possible. There’s this beautiful saying in Portuguese. It’s what the Portuguese administrators in the colonies, like Brazil, used to answer when the government in Lisbon would ask them to do something that was undoable, inappropriate: ‘I obey, but I do not comply.’ And that, I think, is a lot of what happened. People weren’t saying, ‘No, I’m not going to pull troops out of Afghanistan.’ What they would say was ‘If we pull troops out of Afghanistan, here are the things that are going to happen. Are you comfortable with those outcomes?’ That’s a lot of how Jim Mattis, for example, handled his relationship with the president.

This story, which takes place one a Sunday in July in a hot, deserted Lisbon, is the Requiem that the character I refer to as “I” was called on to perform in this book. Were someone to ask me why I wrote this story in Portuguese, I would answer simply that a story like this could only be written in Portuguese; it's as simple as that. But there is something else that needs explaining. Strictly speaking, a Requiem should be written in Latin, at least that's what tradition prescribes. Unfortunately, I don't think I'd be up to it in Latin. I realised though that I couldn't write a Requiem in my own language and I that I required a different language, one that was for me A PLACE OF AFFECTION AND REFLECTION.

The scope of exploration, and distances, involved in the vehicles’ respective journeys were scarcely comparable: Armstrong and Aldrin’s trip to the lunar surface required them to break entirely free of Earth’s gravity and embark on an eight-day round trip through more than 900,000 miles of outer space; the Space Shuttle would be required merely to travel into low Earth orbit—between 190 and 330 miles above sea level—where it would circle the planet for up to a week before returning home. In some ways, it was as if the sixteenth-century explorer Ferdinand Magellan had proposed to follow up the first circumnavigation of the world by rowing across Lisbon harbor and back.

Bobby’s father Robert was a huge Celtic fan and on 11 May 1953 he took his son to see Celtic beat the Arsenal 1-0 in front of a 60,000 crowd at Parkhead in the Coronation Cup, held to celebrate Queen Elizabeth II’s accession to the throne.

Inside the body of Torah, folded like a phoenix in its egg, is the story of the spiritual journey each of us can make, from slavery to sanctity. The Passover Haggadah is a golden bell whose singing tones tell us: always remember that the Holy Land is in you!

Auntie Christine in Leeds was, in reality, part of a new branch of British intelligence dedicated to aiding POWs and servicemen shot down or lost in enemy territory. It operated under various cover names, including The Lisbon Book Fund, The Welsh Provident Society, The Licensed Victuallers Sports Association, The British Local Ladies’ Comforts Society, and The Jigsaw Puzzle Club. But its official name was MI9, the youngest addition to the Military Intelligence family that already included MI5 and MI6.

Your magic carpet to the "Reeperbahn" or "St. Pauli" is the Metro known as the S Bahn or U Bahn. My visit to this seedy part of Hamburg was cut short primarily because it was expensive and my time in Lisbon cost more than I had expected, but aside from that you always have to be aware of pickpockets and tricksters. A large police presence does, for the greatest part, keep crime down and fortunately I didn’t have any problems. Many of the establishments are closed during the day and the area doesn’t come to life before 8 PM. If you do visit St. Pauli during the daylight hours, expect things to be quiet and perhaps you’ll get a lucky break. If nothing else, you’ll have a fantastic view of the busy harbor as the street runs alongside the Elbe River. Go early on Sunday morning and the St. Pauli Landungsbrücken, the boat landing, will have become an active flee market.

the ancient British tradition of pointless interdepartmental rivalry, MI6 (responsible for intelligence overseas) still did not inform MI5 (responsible for counterespionage in the UK) of Pujol’s existence. Only a chance conversation between Tar Robertson and an MI6 officer from Lisbon alerted B1A to what was going on. Even then, MI6 was unwilling to allow Pujol to join the Double Cross team. “I do not see why I should get agents and have them pinched by you” was, according to Guy Liddell, the attitude taken by MI6’s head of counterintelligence. “The whole thing is so narrow and petty that it really makes me quite furious,” wrote Liddell.

Celtic won the European Cup, beating Internazionale in Lisbon with a team made up of players who hailed from within twelve miles of Celtic Park. It was a Glasgow team of Glasgow men.

Is the soul a place of facts? Or are the alleged facts only the deceptive shadows of our stories?

It would be a sign of the maturing nature of Portuguese democracy if the issues surrounding its trade in World War II were given a less politicized and a more open and fair critical assessment. Only then will the story of Lisbon during World War II have a real ending.