Fernando Pessoa · 286 pages
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“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“My past is everything I failed to be.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while. […]. I'm two, and both keep their distance — Siamese twins that aren't attached.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept—our own selves—that we love.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“I've always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I'm not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“I feel as if I'm always on the verge of waking up.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“I wasn’t meant for reality, but life came and found me.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“Everything around me is evaporating. My whole life, my memories, my imagination and its contents, my personality - it's all evaporating. I continuously feel that I was someone else, that I felt something else, that I thought something else. What I'm attending here is a show with another set. And the show I'm attending is myself.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“I've never done anything but dream. This, and this alone, has been the meaning of my life. My only real concern has been my inner life.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“We worship perfection because we can't have it; if we had it, we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“I’ve dreamed a lot. I’m tired now from dreaming but not tired of dreaming. No one tires of dreaming, because to dream is to forget, and forgetting does not weigh on us, it is a dreamless sleep throughout which we remain awake. In dreams I have achieved everything.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“I've always been an ironic dreamer, unfaithful to my inner promises.
Like a complete outsider, a casual observer of whom I thought I was,
I've always enjoyed watching my daydreams go down in defeat.
I was never convinced of what I believed in.
I filled my hands with sand, called it gold, and opened them up to let it slide through.
Words were my only truth.
When the right words were said, all was done; the rest was the sand that had always been.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“To have opinions is to sell out to youself. To have no opinions is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“I'm sick of everything, and of the everythingness of everything.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“Ah, it's my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me!”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the material world and, since it is the spirit that travels, it is the spirit that is experienced. That is why there exist contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely, more tumultuously than others who have lived their lives purely externally.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street. There are images tucked away in books that live more vividly than many men and women. There are phrases from literary works that have a positively human personality. There are passages from my own writing that chill me with fright, so distinctly do I feel them as people, so sharply outlined do they appear against the walls of my room, at night, in shadows... I've written sentences whose sound, read out loud or silently (impossible to hide their sound), can only be of something that acquired absolute exteriority and a full-fledged soul.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. Music soothes, the visual arts exhilarates, the performing arts (such as acting and dance) entertain. Literature, however, retreats from life by turning in into slumber. The other arts make no such retreat— some because they use visible and hence vital formulas, others because they live from human life itself.
This isn't the case with literature. Literature simulates life. A novel is a story of what never was, a play is a novel without narration. A poem is the expression of ideas or feelings a language no one uses, because no one talks in verse.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“The essence of what I desire is simply this: to sleep away life.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“I don't know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don't know what to think or what I am.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“Life is what we make of it. Travel is the traveler. What we see isn't what we see but what we are.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“Friends: not one. Just a few acquaintances who imagine they feel something for me and who might be sorry if a train ran over me and the funeral was on a rainy day.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“Being tired of all illusions and of everything about illusions – the loss of illusions, the uselessness of having them, the prefatigue of having to have them in order to lose them, the sadness of having had them, the intellectual shame of having had them knowing that they would have to end this way.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
“I carry my awareness of defeat like a banner of victory.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Il libro dell'inquietudine di Bernardo Soares
Fernando Pessoa
Born place: in Lisbon, Portugal
Born date June 13, 1888
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“I turn just as Aithinne leaps from a rock that juts out under the cliff. She lands with a soft thud, looking very pleased with herself. Her clothes are sopping wet, hair dripping, every inch of her covered in sand. And she doesn’t seem to mind one bit.
Aithinne makes her way across the larger beach rocks toward us, her movements graceful. “You both look miserable.”
“I’m cold and wet,” I say. “I feel wretched, and my blunderbuss is probably destroyed from the swim. No need to state the obvious.”
She glances at her brother. “And I suppose your face is just stuck that way?”
Kiaran pushes to his feet and I do the same. “What you see is the incessant, grave look of someone in possession of a sibling.”
“Ha ha.” Aithinne focuses her attention on me, tilting her head. “You know, I had a kyloe look at me exactly like that once. His hair was a similar color and everything.”
I glare at her. “You did not just compare me to a cow.”
“No, no. I compared your expression to one. Cows truly are majestic creatures, aren’t they”
― Elizabeth May, quote from The Vanishing Throne
“Dia tidak pernah takut pada laba-laba, sepeda yang kotor, atau jemarinya terkena panas oven--dan dia sering mengalami semua itu. Namun, berjalan ke ruangan yang sama dengan pria yang ditaksirnya? Itu menakutkan.”
― quote from Bliss
“Along The Sun-Drenched Roadside
Along the sun-drenched roadside, from the great
hollow half-treetrunk, which for generations
has been a trough, renewing in itself
an inch or two of rain, I satisfy
my thirst: taking the water's pristine coolness
into my whole body through my wrists.
Drinking would be too powerful, too clear;
but this unhurried gesture of restraint
fills my whole consciousness with shining water.
Thus, if you came, I could be satisfied
to let my hand rest lightly, for a moment,
lightly, upon your shoulder or your breast.
Translated by Stephen Mitchell”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, quote from The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke
“Shandy looked ahead. Blackbeard, apparently willing to get the explanation later, had picked up his oars and was rowing again.
'May I presume to suggest,' yelled Shandy giddily to Davies,
'that we preoceed the hell out of here with all due haste.'
Davies pushed a stray lock of hair back from his forehead and sat down on the rower's thwart. 'My dear fellow consider it done.”
― Tim Powers, quote from On Stranger Tides
“Freedom has its dangers as well as its joys. And the sooner we learn to get up after a fall, the better off we'll be.”
― Alice Steinbach, quote from Without Reservations: The Travels of an Independent Woman
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