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The Night in Lisbon

Book by Erich Maria Remarque · 2 quotes · Lithuanian, Life, Happiness

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The Night in Lisbon Quotes

“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.”

LonelinessIllusionRejectionCompanionshipForgettingClosenessSlipping AwayKnowing SomeoneGrowing ApartDistancing Self
Book:The Night in Lisbon
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“I won't be seeing you again," he said. "It's just as well. I've told you too much to want to see you again." I wasn't so sure of that. It seemed possible that he would want to see me later on for that very reason. I alone, he believed, possessed an unfalsified image of his life. But that could make him hate me; perhaps he would feel that I had taken his wife from him, this time irrevocably—if he really believed that his own memory deceived him and only mine remained clear.”

MemoryStorytellingFarewellForgettingRememberingGoodbyesSharing LifeSharing Secrets
Book:The Night in Lisbon
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