"Given that we can live only a small part of what there is in us -- what happens with the rest?"
"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?"
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Source: Pascal Mercier (2009). “Night Train To Lisbon”, p.28, Atlantic Books Ltd
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"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."
"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 we can find again only by going back there. We travel to ourselves when we go to a place. We have covered a stretch of our life no matter how brief it may have been but by traveling to ourselves we must confront our own loneliness. And isn’t it so that everything we do is done out of fear of our loneliness? Isn’t that why we renounce all the things we will regret at the end of our life?"
"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."
"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."
"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?"