14p.
..For the homeless, Gaustine felt love and dread, those were the precise words, and always in that combination. He loved them and feared them in the way you love and fear something you have already been or expect to become.... - P-1
27p.
..Somewhere nearby the Doors‘ Alabama Song is playing, and suddenly it seemed to me that there was a secret conversation going on, that Morrison was actually talking to Auden. Exactly in that refrain, that line, as if resolving the hesitation in Auden‘s least favorite line, We must love one another or die. In Morrison‘s case there is no longer any hesitation, the answer is categorical: I tell you we must die. - P-1
29~30p.
..Zurich is a city for growing old. The world has slowed down, the river of life has settled into a lake, lazy and calm on the surface, the luxury of boredom and sun on the hill for old bones. Time in all of its relativity. It is no coincidence whatsoever that two major discoveries of the twentieth century tied precisely to time were made here, of all places, in Switzerland—Einstein‘s Theory of Relativity and Thomas Mann‘s Magic Mountain. - P-1
35p.
..To be merciless toward the past. Because the past itself is merciless. - P-1
47p.
..The past is not just that which happened to you. Sometimes it is that which you just imagined. - P-1
62p.
...The bright future gives me heartburn, he once told a group of friends. (That, of course, immediately got written down). Shortly thereafter Brodsky, if I recall, formulated it more beautifully, but it was the same idea: "My objections to that system were not so much political as aesthetic." Nevertheless, I prefer Mr. N.‘s formulation. His objections to the system were physiological. - P-1
66p.
...Without being able to formulate it clearly, he senses that if no one remembers, then everything is permissible. ‘If no one remembers‘ becomes the equivalent of ‘If there is no God.‘ If there is no God, Dostoyevsky said, then everything is permitted. God will turn out to be nothing but a huge memory. A memory of sins. A cloud with infinite megabytes of memory. A forgetful God, a God with Alzheimer‘s, would free us from all obligations. No memory, no crime. - P-1
102p.
..There are things you remember your whole life. Perhaps because fathers at that time—and my father was no exception—generally spoke down to children. So when my father told me life is more than a single loss, it was an usual event. It must be a fatherly commandment. I never did quite figure out whether he meant that life would be full of losses and this was just the first of them, or that life was always more than any one loss. Maybe both. - P-1
106p.
..Now, those are the signs of a healthy body—it feels ashamed, it foresees what might happen, it thinks about the future, and even after its death, it is vain. The body that truly desires death no longer experiences vanity. - P-1
111p.
..Now the last person who remembered me as a child is gone, I told myself. And only then did I burst into sobs, like a child. - P-1
113p.
..What I wouldn‘t give to find out how Odysseus‘s story continued, after his return home, a month, a year or two later, when the euphoria of arrival had passed. His favorite dog, the only living creature that recognized him immediately, without the need for proof (unconditional love and memory) would have died. Did he begin to have regrets and pine for Calypso‘s breasts, for nights on that island, for all those wonders and adventures on his long journey? I imagine him getting up out of his marriage bed, which he himself had crafted, in the middle of the night, sneaking out so as not to wake Penelope, sitting on the doorstep outside, and remembering everything. That whole twenty-year voyage had become the past, and the moon of that past attracted him ever more strongly, like at high tide. A high tide of past. - P-1
124p.
..The task was as follows. How can we gain a little more time for tomorrow, when we face a critical deficit of future? The simple answer was: By going backward a bit. If anything is certain, it‘s the past. Fifty years ago is more certain than fifty years from now. If you go two, three, even five decades back, you come out exactly that much ahead. Yes, it might already have been lived out, it might be a "secondhand" future, but it‘s still a future. It‘s still better than the nothingness yawning before us now. Since a Europe of the future is no longer possible, let‘s choose a Europe of the past. It‘s simple. When you have no future, you vote for the past. - P-1
150p.
..The things I do not dare to do will transform into stories. - P-1
164p.
...You can‘t make a museum to preserve something that has never left. - P-1
177p.
..The more a society forgets, the more someone produces, sells, and fills the freed-up niches with ersatz-memory. The light industry of memory. The past made from light materials, plastic memory as if spit out by a 3-D printer. Memory according to needs and demand. The new Lego—different modules of the past are on offer, which fit precisely into the empty space. - P-1
182p.
..I knew of the beggars of Baldevo, who were the descendants of Tsar Samuel‘s blinded soldiers who scattered across the land after the grimmest of Bulgarian defeats in 1014 and became wandering gusla players and singers on the bridges and squares. To earn a crust of bread with songs about misfortunes and blinded soldiers.... - P-1
202p.
...but as you know, to the orphan every woman is a mother, every man is a father.... - P-1
208p.
..If anything can save this country from all the kitsch that is raining down on it, that is laziness and apathy alone. That which destroys it will also protect it. In apathetic and lazy nations, neither kitsch nor evil can win out for long, because they take effort and upkeep. That was my optimistic theory, but a little voice inside my head kept saying: When it comes to making trouble, even a lazy man works hard. - P-1
210p.
..When people with whom you‘ve shared a common past leave, they take half of it with them. Actually, they take the whole thing, since there‘s no such thing as half a past. It‘s as if you‘ve torn a page in half lengthwise and you‘re reading the lines only to the middle, and the other person is reading the ends. And nobody understands anything. The person holding the other half is gone. That person who was so close during those days, mornings, afternoons, evenings, and nights, in the months and years... There is no one to confirm it, there is no one to play through it with. When my wife left, I felt like I lost half my past. Actually, I lost the whole thing.
..The past can only be played by four hands, by four hands at the very least. - P-1
219p.
...Sooner or later all utopias turn into historical novels. - P-1
239p.
..As Gaustine would say: Warning, history in the rearview mirror is always closer than it appears... - P-1
239p.
..In the end, the banal always wins out, the trivial and its barbarians sooner or later invade and conquer the empires of weighty ideology.... - P-1
241p.
..A person is not built to live in the prison of one body and one time. - P-1
267p.
..Memory holds you, freezes you, within the fixed outlines of a single, solitary person whom you cannot leave. Oblivion comes to liberate you. Features lose their sharpness and definitiveness, vagueness blurs the shape. If I don‘t clearly remember who exactly I am, I could be anyone, even myself, even myself as a child.... - P-1
271p.
..In the end, writing arises when man realizes that memory is not enough.
..The early clay tablets with cuneiform from Mesopotamia do not hold any wisdom about the secrets of the world as we might expect, but rather completely practical information about the number of sheep in one herd or the different words for "pig." The first written artifacts were lists. In the beginning (and the end), there is always a list. - P-1
274p.
..A library with empty, abandoned books—with no titles, no authors, no texts. White pages, tabula rasa. A child‘s mind is a tabula rasa and we must write everything upon it. His teacher had said this at the ceremony to mark the start of first grade. He had remembered this strange phrase precisely because he didn‘t understand it. His mind was again a tabula rasa, except that now nothing more could be printed upon it. The film had been exposed. - P-1
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