Peter Bieri (author) Quotes

20 Sourced Quotes

A feeling is no longer the same when it comes the second time. It dies through the awareness of its return. We become tired and weary of our feelings when they come too often and last too long.

Peter Bieri
We live here and now. Everything before and in other places is past. Mostly forgotten. What could, what should be done with all the time that lies ahead of us, open and unshaped, feather-light in its freedom and lead-heavy in its uncertainty? Is it a wish? Dream-like and nostalgic, to stand once again at that point in life and be able to take a completely different direction than the one that has made us who we are?

Peter Bieri
Kitsch is the most pernicious of all prisons. The bars are covered with the gold of simplistic, unreal feelings, so that you take them for the pillars of a palace.

Peter Bieri
To live for the moment: it sounds so right and so beautiful. But the more I want to, the less I understand what it means.

Peter Bieri
Our lives are rivers, gliding free to that unfathomed, boundless sea, the silent grave!

Peter Bieri
I would not like to live in a world without cathedrals. I need their beauty and grandeur. I need their imperious silence. I need it against the witless bellowing of the barracks yard and the witty chatter of the yes-men. I want to hear the rustling of the organ, this deluge of ethereal notes. I need it against the shrill farce of marches.

Peter Bieri
Gregorius was never to forget this scene. They were his first Portuguese words in the real world and they worked. That words could cause something in the world, make someone move or stop, laugh or cry: even as a child he had found it enigmatic and it had never stopped impressing him. How did words do that? Wasn't it like magic? But at this moment, the mystery seemed greater than usual, for these were words he hadn't even known yesterday morning.

Peter Bieri
We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there.

Peter Bieri
What did i know of your fantasies? Why do we know so little about the fantasies of our parents? What do we know of somebody if we know nothing of the images passed to him by his imagination?

Peter Bieri
Isn't it true that it's not people who meet, but rather the shadows cast by their imaginations?

Peter Bieri
We are stratified creatures, creatures full of abysses, with a soul of inconstant quicksilver, with a mind whose color and shape change as in a kaleidoscope that is constantly shaken.

Peter Bieri
I am still there, at that distant place in time, I never left it, but live expanded in the past, or out of it.

Peter Bieri
Given that we can live only a small part of what there is in us — what happens with the rest?

Peter Bieri
In the years afterward, I fled whenever somebody began to understand me. That has subsided. But one thing remained: I don't want anybody to understand me completely. I want to go through life unknown. The blindness of others is my safety and my freedom.

Peter Bieri
Life is not what we live; it is what we imagine we are living.

Peter Bieri
It wasn't only that you didn't see him anymore, meet him anymore. You saw his absence and encountered it as something tangible. His not being there was like the sharply outlined emptiness of a photo with a figure cut out precisely with scissors and now the missing figure is more important, more dominant than all others.

Peter Bieri
We are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others

Peter Bieri
Then there was a silence he had never before experienced: in it, you could hear the years.

Peter Bieri
So, the fear of death might be described as the fear of not being able to become whom one had planned to be.

Peter Bieri
But when we set out to understand somebody's inside? Is that a trip that ever ends? Is the soul a place of facts? Or are the alleged facts only the deceptive shadows of our stories?

Peter Bieri