Night In Lisbon 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.

Strange how complicated we can make things just to avoid showing what we feel!

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

So, the fear of death might be described as the fear of not being able to become whom one had planned to be.

That words could cause something in the world, make someone move or stop, laugh or cry: even as a child he had found it extraordinary and it never stopped impressing him. How did words do that? Wasn't it like magic?

Isn't it true that it's not people who meet, but rather the shadows cast by their imaginations?

What comfort there is in the skin of someone you love!

غريبٌ حقاً أمرنا , نختار طرقاً ملتوية كي لا نظهر حقيقة مشاعرنا

I love tunnels. They 're the symbol of hope: sometime it will be bright again. If by chance it is not night.

Loyalty... A will, a decision, a resolution of the soul.

There were people who read and there were the others. Whether you were the a reader or a non-reader was soon apparent. There was no greater distinction between people.

When we talk about ourselves, about others, or simply about things, we want- it could be said – to reveal ourselves in our words: We want to show what we think and feel. We let other have a glimpse into our soul.

Then there was a silence he had never before experienced: in it, you could hear the years.

I am still there, at that distant place in time, I never left it, but live expanded in the past, or out of it.

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?

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.

It wasn't only that you didn't see him anymore, meet him anymore. You saw his absence and encountered it as something tangible. His not being there was like the sharply outlined emptiness of a photo with a figure cut out precisely with scissors and now the missing figure is more important, more dominant than all others.

[Vanity's] an unrecognized form of stupidity... you have to forget the cosmic meaninglessness of all our acts to be able to be vain and that’s a glaring form of stupidity.

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?

We are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others

that since Cecilia’s suicide, the Lisbons could hardly wait for night to forget themselves in sleep.

I would not like to live in a world without cathedrals. I need their beauty and grandeur. I need their imperious silence. I need it against the witless bellowing of the barracks yard and the witty chatter of the yes-men. I want to hear the rustling of the organ, this deluge of ethereal notes. I need it against the shrill farce of marches.

Our lives are rivers, gliding free to that unfathomed, boundless sea, the silent grave!

لأن التعاسة في الحياة أكثر بكثير من السعادة, لذا فعدم أبديتها رحمة كبيرة

Why do we feel sorry for people who can't travel? Because, unable to expand externally, they are not able to expand internally either, they can't multiply and so they are deprived of the possibility of undertaking expansive excursions in themselves and discovering who and what else they could have become.

It’s not the pain and the wounds that are the worst... The worst is the humiliation.

What did I know of your fantasies? Why do we know so little about the fantasies of our parents? What do we know of somebody if we know nothing of the images passed to him by his imagination?

Обичам те много - казах аз. - Обичам теб и този миг, и лятото, което ще отмине, и този пейзаж, и раздялата, и за първи път през живота си самия мен, защото целият съм твое огледало, отразявам те и така двойно те притежавам.

Disappointment is considered bad. A thoughtless prejudice. How, if not through disappointment, should we discover what we have expected and hoped for? And where, if not in this discovery, should self-knowledge lie? So how could one gain clarity about oneself without disappointment? ... One could have the hope that he would become more real by reducing expectations, shrink to a hard, reliable core and thus be immune to the pain of disappointment. But how would it be to lead a life that banished every long, bold expectation, a life where there were only banal expectations like "the bus is coming"?

لن أراك مرة ثانية، وهذا هو الأفضل؛ فأنا حدثتك الكثير عن نفسي، الأمر الذي يمنعني من محاولة رؤيتك ثانية

Don't waste your time, do something worthwhile with it." But what can that mean: worthwhile? Finally to start realizing long-cherished wishes. To attack the error that there will always be time for it later....Take the long-dreamed-of trip, learn this language, read those books, buy yourself this jewelry, spend a night in that famous hotel. Don't miss out on yourself. Bigger things are also part of that: to give up the loathed profession, break out of a hated milieu. Do what contributes to making you more genuine, moves you closer to yourself.

ذكرياتنا ليست تحفة عاجية معروضة في متحف محكم ضد الغبار. بل حيوان يعيش ويلتهم ويهضم.. إنها كالتنين في الأساطير, تلتهم نفسها لأنها الطريق الوحيد الذي تستطيع من خلاله الاستمرار.

Think that you have to die someday, maybe this morning.” “I think of it all the time, and so I play hooky from the office and let myself bask in the sun.

ربما أطلق في المستقبل على عصرنا هذا اسم زمن السخرية.

You can never have for yourself someone who isn't on good terms with himself.

To stand by yourself -- that was also part of dignity. That way, a person could get through a public flaying with dignity. Galileo. Luther. Even somebody who admitted his guilt and resisted the temptation to deny it. Something politicians couldn't do. Honesty, the courage for honesty. With others and yourself.

Омразата е киселина, която разяжда душата - без значение дали мразим, или сме мразени.

I would not like to live in a world without cathedrals. I need their beauty and grandeur. I need them against the vulgarity of the world.

At night the cries of cats making love or fighting, their caterwauling in the dark, told us that the world was pure emotion, flung back and forth among its creatures, the agony of the one-eyed Siamese no different from that of the Lisbon girls, and even the trees plunged in feeling.

الإيمان بحدوث الأعجايب هو إحساس ملازم لهؤلاء الذين يعيشيون حالة الفرار واليأس والخوف ولولا هذا الإيمان لفد الإنسان قدرته على الاستمرار

There’s something good about unpleasant memories: they make you think you’re happy when a moment before you were convinced of the contrary.

NOBREZA SILENCIOSA. SILENT NOBILITY. It is a mistake to believe that the crucial moments of a life when its habitual direction changes forever must be loud and shrill dramatics, washed away by fierce internal surges. This is a kitschy fairy tale started by boozing journalists, flashbulb-seeking filmmakers and authors whose minds look like tabloids. In truth, the dramatics of a life-determining experience are often unbelievably soft. It has so little akin to the bang, the flash, of the volcanic eruption that, at the moment it is made, the experience is often not even noticed. When it deploys its revolutionary effect and plunges a life into a brand-new light giving it a brand-new melody, it does that silently and in this wonderful silence resides its special nobility.

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.

‏”‏ إذا استطعت أن تلغي الشعور بالبحث عن العدالة فعندها يسهل عليك النظر إلى الحياة وكأنها مغامرة !

صمت كان يفكر بلا شك في كلمة أخيرة „ يبحث عن تأكيد حب .. عن شئ يمكن أن يحمله معه في رحلة وحدته

Kitsch is the most pernicious of all prisons. The bars are covered with the gold of simplistic, unreal feelings, so that you take them for the pillars of a palace.

Sreća, kad je doživljujemo, nikad nije potpuna. Tek u sjećanju postaje potpuna...

Тя седеше пред мен - изящна амазонка, гола с чаша вино в ръка, предизвикателна, неотстъпваща, хитра и смела - и аз разбрах, че по-рано изобщо не съм я познавал.

Ала кажете ми, щом като един човешки живот не е ценен, кое е ценното тогава? - Нищо - отговорих аз и знаех, че беше истина и все пак не беше. - Само ние го правим ценен.

الكراهيه هي أحد أنواع الحوامض التي تتلف النفس, ولا يفرق هذا الحامض بين كره النفس لذاتها أو كره الآخرين لها

When dictatorship is a fact, revolution is a duty”.

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.

Laimė - sąlyginis dalykas. Kas šitą suvokė, retai kada jaučiasi labai nelaimingas.

لو أستطيع الآن استحلاف الذاكرة ألا تظن أنني سأطلب منها أن تبقي هذه الليلة في ذاكراتي كما أراها الآن .. ألا تظن أنها يجب أن تحيا في داخلي على هذا النحو مادمت حيا ؟

How would it be after the last sentence? The last sentence he had always feared and from the middle of a book, he had always been tormented by the thought that there would inevitably be a last sentence.

Each of us is several, is man, is a profusion of selves. So that the self who disdains his surroundings is not the same as the self who suffers or takes joy in them. In the colony of our being there are many species of people who think and feel in different ways.

لقد خلفنا أحلامنا في كل مكان كخيوط العنكبوت المتطايرة في الخريف

Sleepless people were bound by a wordless solidarity.

Обичай ме! Обичай ме и не питай. Нищо. Никога.

ربما ليست الحياة التي تنتظرها، بل العدم الذي تحاول استحلافه في بعض الأحيان

Isterijos ir baimės apimti žmonės seka paskui lozungus, nepriklausomai nuo to, kas ir kieno vardu juos skelbia, jei tik rėksnys pažada masei prisiimti sunkią mąstymo naštą ir atsakomybę už tai, ko ji bijo, bet negali išvengti.

We became acquainted with starry skies the girls had gazed at while camping years before, and the boredom of summers traipsing from back yard to front to back again, and even a certain indefinable smell that arose from toilets on rainy nights, which the girls called "sewery." We knew what it felt like to see a boy with his shirt off, and why it made Lux write the name Kevin in purple Magic Marker all over her three-ring binder and even on her bras and panties, and we understood her rage coming home one day to find that Mrs. Lisbon had soaked her things in Clorox, bleaching all the "Kevins" out. We knew the pain of winter wind rushing up your skirt, and the ache of keeping your knees together in class, and how drab and infuriating it was to jump rope while the boys played baseball. We could never understand why the girls cared so much about being mature, or why they felt compelled to compliment each other, but sometimes, after one of us had read a long portion of the diary out loud, we had to fight back the urge to hug one another or to tell each other how pretty we were. We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn't fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.

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?

For that is the meaning of a farewell in the full, important sense of the word: that the two people, because they part, come to an understanding of how they have seen and experienced each other. What succeeded between them and what failed. That takes fearlessness: you have to be able to endure the pain of dissonance. It is also about acknowledging what was impossible. Parting is also something you do with yourself: to stand by yourself under the look of the other. The cowardice of a farewell resides in the transfiguration: in the attempt to bathe what was in a golden light and deny the dark. What you forfeit in that is nothing less than the acknowledgement of your self in those features produced by darkness.

إننا نعيش في زمن المتناقضات ونقود الحرب من أجل السلام.

...the dreamlike, bombastic wish to stand once again at that point in my life and be able to take a completely different direction than the one that has made me who I am now... To sit once more on the warm moss and hold the cap - it's the absurd wish to go back behind myself in time and take myself - the only marked by events - along on this journey.

أريد هيلين بعطرها و ثيابها، بالسرير و بالغروب. تمنيت لو أستطيع بسط نفسي عليها كلحاف و لو كانت لي آلاف الأيدي و آلاف الأفواه، تمنيت أن أصبح عدسة مقعرة كاملة أستطيع فيها أن أحسها أينما وجدت و من دون فراغات

Getting to know a city through the books in it—he had always done that.

Boundless openness is simply not possible. It is beyond our power. The loneliness of having to conceal, it also exists.

Because the one who wishes it – isn’t the one who, still untouched by the future, stands at the crossroads. Instead, it is the one marked by the future become past who wants to go back to the past, to revoke the irrevocable. And would he want to revoke it if he hadn’t suffered it?

It is a mistake to believe that the decisive moments of a life when its direction changes for ever must be marked by sentimental loud and shrill dramatics… In truth, the dramatic moments of a life-determining experience are often unbelievably low-key. It has so little in common with the bang, the flash, or the volcanic eruption that, at the moment it happens, the experience is often not even noticed. When it unfolds its revolutionary effect, and ensures that a life is revealed in a brand-new light, with a brand-new melody, it does that silently and in this wonderful silence resides its special nobility.

Sometimes I go to the beach and stand facing the wind, which I wish were icy, colder than we know it in these parts. I wish it would blow all the hackneyed words, all the insipid habits of language out of me so that I could come back with a cleansed mind, cleansed of the banalities of the same talk.

„Неприятните спомени имаха и нещо положително: те ни убеждаваха, че сме щастливи, докато само преди секунда сме мислили обратното. Щастието е въпрос на степенуване. Който владее това изкуство, рядко е изцяло нещастен.

Encounters between people, it often seems to me, are like trains passing at breakneck speed in the night. We cast fleeting looks at the passengers sitting behind dull glass in dim light, who disappear from our field of vision almost before we perceive them. Was it really a man and a woman who flashed past like phantoms, who came out of nothing into the empty dark, without meaning or purpose? Did they know each other? Did they talk? Laugh? Cry? People will say: That's how it is when strangers pass one another in rain and wind and there might be something in the comparison. But we sit opposite people for longer, we eat and work together, lie next to each other, live under the same roof. Where is the haste? Yet everything that gives the illusion of permanence, familiarity, and intimate knowledge: isn't it a deception invented to reassure, with which we try to conceal and ward off the flickering, disturbing haste because it could be impossible to live with all the time. 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? Don't our looks bounce off others, as in the hasty encounter of the night, and leave us with nothing but conjectures, slivers of thoughts and imagined qualities? Isn't it true that it's not people who meet, but rather the shadows cast by their imaginations?

One who would really like to know himself would have to be a restless, fanatical collector of disappointments, and seeking disappointing experiences must be like an addiction, the all-determining addiction of his life, for it would stand so clearly before his eyes that disappointment is not a hot, destroying poison, but rather a cool calming balm that opens our eyes to the real contours of ourselves.

Galimybė nusižudyti yra likimo dovana, kurią mes retai tesuvokiame. Ji suteikia laisvo apsisprendimo iliuziją. Ko gero, mes žudomės kur kas dažniau, negu manome. Tik nejaučiame to.

عكاكيز! إنني أعرف ذلك. لقد سمتهم مرة عكاكيز تستعملها كي تبقى وفية لي.. هل تفهم هذا؟ إنه جنون

Jak se člověk rozloučí s někým, kdo mu ovlivnil život jako nikdo jiný?

المشهد الأزلي للبشرية .. ‫‏السلطة‬ .. ‫‏الضحية‬ .. ‫‏العبد‬ .. الثالث ليس سوى المتفرج الذي لا يرفع يده احتجاجاً و لا يندفع للدفاع عن الضحية و لا يقوم بمحاولة لتحريره , لأنه يخاف على سلامته و بالتالي و لهذا السبب تبقى سلامته مهددة دائماً ..

الأشخاص الذين أحبهم بعمق أكثر من صورة هؤلاء المنتصرين الأغبياء؟ ماذا نمتلك في الحقيقة؟ ولماذا هذا الصمت حول أشياء لا يمكن أن تزهر إلا إذا نظرنا إليها كإعارة لبعض الوقت؟ لماذا هذه المقولات كلها حولها؟ وما أهمية النقاش حول قوة أحد في امتلاكها إذا كانت كلمة امتلاك لا تعني سوى احتضان الهواء؟

Pokud je to tak, že můžeme žít jen malou část z toho, co je v nás - co se stane se zbytkem?

Stebuklas, kai jį patiri, niekuomet nėra pilnas, tik atmintis padaro jį tokiu.

Gražiausias pasaulio miestas yra tas, kuriame žmogus laimingas.

Лето коротко. Лето коротко, и жизнь тоже коротка, но что же делает ее короткой? Разве бродячие кошки знают, что что жизнь коротка? Разве знает об этом птица? Бабочка? Они считают ее вечной. Никто им этого не сказал. Зачем же нам сказали об этом?

Гледах го да върви по улицата надолу с куфара в ръка, окаяна фигура, образа на вечния рогоносец и на вечния любещ. Ала от цялата галерия тъпи победители не бе ли той притежавал по-дълбоко човека, когото обичаше? И какво притежаваме в действителност. Защо е тази врява около неща, които в най-добрия случай са само взети за известно време назаем; и защо са тези брътвежи за това, дали ги притежаваме повече или по-малко, след като измамната дума „притежавам“ означава само: да прегърнем нищото?

O VENENO ARDENTE DO DESGOSTO. THE WHITE HOT POISON OF ANGER. When others make us angry at them- at their shamelessness, injustice, inconsideration- then they exercise power over us, they proliferate and gnaw at our soul, then anger is like a white-hot poison that corrods all mild, noble and balanced feelings and robs us of sleep. Sleepless, we turn on the light and are angry at the anger that has lodged like a succubus who sucks us dry and debilitates us. We are not only furious at the damage, but also that it develops in us all by itself, for while we sit on the edge of the bed with aching temples, the distant catalyst remains untouched by the corrosive force of the anger that eats at us. On the empty internal stage bathed in the harsh light of mute rage, we perform all by ourselves a drama with shadow figures and shadow words we hurl against enemies in helpless rage we feel as icy blazing fire in our bowels. And the greater our despair that is only a shadow play and not a real discussion with the possibility of hurting the other and producing a balance of suffering, the wilder the poisonous shadows dance and haunt us even in the darkest catacombs of our dreams. (We will turn the tables, we think grimly, and all night long forge words that will produce in the other the effect of a fire bomb so that now he will be the one with the flames of indignation raging inside while we, soothed by schadenfreude, will drink our coffee in cheerful calm.) What could it mean to deal appropriately with anger? We really don't want to be soulless creatures who remain thoroughly indifferent to what they come across, creatures whose appraisals consist only of cool, anemic judgments and nothing can shake them up because nothing really bothers them. Therefore, we can't seriously wish not to know the experience of anger and instead persist in an equanimity that wouldn't be distinguished from tedious insensibility. Anger also teaches us something about who we are. Therefore this is what I'd like to know: What can it mean to train ourselves in anger and imagine that we take advantage of its knowledge without being addicted to its poison? We can be sure that we will hold on to the deathbed as part of the last balance sheet- and this part will taste bitter as cyanide- that we have wasted too much, much too much strength and time on getting angry and getting even with others in a helpless shadow theater, which only we, who suffered impotently, knew anything about. What can we do to improve this balance sheet? Why did our parents, teachers and other instructors never talk to us about it? Why didn't they tell something of this enormous significance? Not give us in this case any compass that could have helped us avoid wasting our soul on useless, self-destructive anger?

I often feel an aversion, even disgust at the same words written and spoken over and over – at the same expressions, phrases, and metaphors repeated. And the worst is, when I listen to myself I have to admit that I too endlessly repeat the same things. They’re so horribly frayed and threadbare, these words, worn out by constant overuse. Do they still have any meaning?

Po danu Lisabon ima nečeg naivno teatralnog što privlači i očarava — ali je noću grad iz bajke koji se sa blistavo osvijetljenim terasama spušta ka moru, kao neka nagizdana žena što se naginje ka svom tamnoplavom ljubavniku.

Amžina žmonijos scena: prievartos tarnai, jų auka, o greta - visada ir visais laikais - trečias, žiūrovas, kuris nepakelia rankos apginti auką ir nebando jos išvaduoti, nes bijosi dėl savęs. Ir kaip tik dėl to jam nuolatos gresia pavojus.

Kiekvieną akimirką jaučiame, kad negalime laimės išlaikyti, ir nė nebandome <...> Bet jeigu mes nemėginame sučiupti jos ir suturėti savo šiurkščiomis rankomis, tai gal ji, niekieno nebaidoma, išlieka mūsų akių gilumoje? Gal ji išlieka ten, kol gyvos tos akys?

I revere the word of God for I love its poetic force. I loathe the word of God for I hate its cruelty. The love is a difficult love for it must incessantly separate the luminosity of the words and the violent verbal subjugation by a complacent God. The hatred is a difficult hatred for how can you allow yourself to hate words that are part of the melody of life in this part of the world? Words that taught us early on what reverence is?

They didn't exchange a single word. But in the weeks that followed, Trip spent his days wandering the halls, hoping for Lux to appear, the most naked person with clothes on he had ever seen. Even in sensible school shoes, she shuffled as though barefoot, and the baggy apparel Mrs. Lisbon bought for her only increased her appeal, as though after undressing she had put on whatever was handy. In corduroys her thighs rubbed together, buzzing, and there was always at least one untidy marvel to unravel him: an untucked shirttail, a sock with a hole, a ripped seam showing underarm hair. She carted her books from class to class but never opened them. Her pens and pencils were as temporary as Cinderella's broom. When she smiled, her mouth showed too many teeth, but at night Trip Fontaine dreamed of being bitten by each one.

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.