15 Excerpts from the Book “Night Train to Lisbon” by Swiss Author and Philosopher Pascal Mercier

The author, whose real name is Peter Bieri, was born in 1944 in Bern. Pascal Mercier, who studied philosophy, welcomes the reader with intense thoughts in his novels. It is inevitable to realize that you are actually facing your inner world when you are reading an event. In his novel The Night Train to Lisbon, the hero Raimund Gregorius is fascinated by a Portuguese word he hears. Then, leaving behind the regular life he lived in, he sets out for Lisbon with the magic of this word.

1) “There were people who read, and there were others. It was immediately clear whether someone was reading or not. There was no greater difference between people than that.”

2) “Imagination, it is our last temple.”

3) “One day I read somewhere a sentence like this: Friendships have time and they end. I thought ours will never end, then ours will never end.”

4) “Everyone has the right to be helped to survive, no matter what he has done. He exists as a person, he exists as a human being.”

5) “Even the outer world of an inner world is still part of our inner world, especially when our thoughts about a stranger’s inner world are so far from firm and grounded that they reveal more of ourselves than the other person.”

6) “How difficult it is for a father to prove his merit in front of his children! And how unbearable is the thought that one, with all his weaknesses, blindness, mistakes and discouragement, is engraved in the souls of his children!”

7) “Loneliness from having to be silent; there is such a thing.”

8) “When we leave a place, we leave something of ourselves behind, even if we leave, we stay there.”

9) “I shudder to even think of the unplanned and unknown, yet inevitable and irresistible violence that parents leave indelible marks on their children, such as burns. engraved on their souls.”

10) “Saying goodbye is something one does with oneself as well: it is to stand up for oneself under the gaze of the other person.”

11) “We are all made up of small parts, these parts are so shapeless, so different from each other that each one does whatever he pleases at every moment.”

12) “Is the soul a place of truth? Or are all things truth just the deceptive shadows of our stories, Prado wondered. This also applies to looks, Prado thought. Looks were absent and could be read. Glances were always introspective glances. They were they only existed as long as they were read inside.”

13) “Names are shadows that others put on us and we on them.”

14) “That’s why I find it ridiculous to struggle with life.” he said, “Man is already struggling enough with himself.”

15) “Words have an effect, make a person act, make them stop, make them laugh and cry: it seemed like a mystery to him even as a child, and he was fascinated by it. How did words do that?”