Nighttrain

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Listening to Sigur Ros' Staralfur, while writing this post.
You might want to join me in this amazing atmosphere of dreamy and magical music.

The book i am currently reading is Pascal Mercier's Nighttrain to Lisbon.
I have to admit, i am fascinated by it and it is by far the best book i've read for months, maybe even years.
Books like these make me love words so much.
Sentences made out of the most powerful words, that touch you so...

It's a fascinating story about a man in his midlife, who decides to suddenly leave his hometown Bern in Switserland, to go to Lisbon in Portugal by nighttrain.
I am only at page 82 (from the more than 400 pages), but i already know this book will stay with me, the quotes will fly through my mind as long as i am sane.


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Gregorius (the main character) found an old book in an antique store from a Portugese writer named Amadeu de Prado and he feels so immensely attracted to the book and it's writer that he strongly feels he has to go to Lisbon to find the writer or at least his past.
He feels like Amadeu de Prado is directly talking to him in the book and therefor he can do nothing else than follow his feelings and leave his old life behind.


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In the book, there are a lot of paragraphs from the book Gregorius is so touched by.
The words, the sentences are magical. They make me feel like i am in a sort of other, more intellectual and more clearly thinking state.

The book starts with a quote of Michel de Montaigne.
It just makes you want to read the book immediately.

We all just exist out of colourful stained rags, which are so losely attached to each other that every single one of them constantly waves as it wants; that's why there are as much differences between us and ourselves as between us and others.


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If it is true, that we can only live a small part from what's inside of us, what happens with the rest?


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It's a mistake to think that in ones life the deciding moments, when the familiar directions change forever, must always be full of loud and fierce drama and strong feelings (.....)When an experience unfolds her revolutionary consequences and makes that ones life will be immersed in a totally different light and gets a whole new melody, she does it quietly and in that glorious quietness lies her special nobility.


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Every moment can be the last. Without feeling it coming, in perfect insecurity, i will pass an invisible wall behind which is nothing, not even darkness.
My next step can already be that step through the wall. Isn't it illogical to be afraid of that, while i won't experience that abrupt end and while i already know that this is what will happen?


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(All the quotes from the book are translated by me from the Dutch version of the book.
As mistakes are human, it is possible i made some small mistakes while translating.
Comments on the translations are welcome.)