Zuberino

“...I am sitting on the wall of the castle, looking out over the city, the river, the dish of sea beyond. Oleander, frangipani, laurel, great elm trees. A girl is sitting nearby, writing. The word "goodbye" is drifting in the air around me and I can't seem to catch hold of it. This entire city is a goodbye. The fringe of Europe, the last shore of the first world, it is there that the corroded continent sinks into the sea, dissolves into the infinite mist which the ocean resembles today. This city does not belong to the present, it is earlier here because it is later. The banal has not yet arrived. Lisbon is reluctant. That must be the word, this city puts off the moment of parting, this is where Europe says goodbye to itself. Lethargic songs, gentle decay, great beauty. Memory, postponement of metamorphosis. Not one of those things would find its way into Dr Strabo's Travel Guide. I send the fools to the fado taverns, for their dose of processed saudade. Slauerhoff and Pessoa I keep to myself...”
― Cees Nooteboom, The Following Story

“Yet in diplomacy nothing lasts, nothing is absolute, a conspiracy to murder is no grounds for endangering the flow of conversation.”
― John le Carré, A Perfect Spy

“To the kids, this extravagant convoy might even seem normal. They’ll have to see ordinary trains, at other times in other places, do you realise just how magical this caravan of gypsies is. A few years in Europe will suffice for them to recreate the landscapes handed down to them by their patriarchs and discover that their life is just a chronicle foretold. Then these men of maize will only have to write well to get the Nobel Prize for poems of love and songs of despair.”
― Ramón Chao, The Train of Ice and Fire

“Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge, exists without my consent.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West