Fernando Pessoa - The Book of Disquiet

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Give to each emotion a personality, to each state of mind a soul.

Fernando Pessoa

Ah, who will save me from existing? It's neither death nor life that I want.

Fernando Pessoa

I'm something that I used to be. I'm never where I feel I am, and if I seek myself, I don't know who's seeking me. My boredom with everything has numbed me. I feel banished from my soul.

Fernando Pessoa

The abstract intelligence produces a fatigue that's the worst of all fatigues. It doesn't weigh on us like bodily fatigue, nor disconcert like the fatigue of emotional experience. It's the weight of our consciousness of the world, a shortness of breath in our soul.

Fernando Pessoa

There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street.

Fernando Pessoa

I am the outskirts of some non-existent town, the long-winded prologue to an unwritten book. I'm nobody, nobody. I don't know how to feel or think or love. I'm a character in a novel as yet unwritten, hovering in the air and undone before I've even existed, amongst the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breath life into me.

Fernando Pessoa

I want to be a work of art, at least in my soul, since I can't be one in my body.

Fernando Pessoa

Nostalgia! I feel it even for someone who meant nothing to me, out of anxiety for the flight of time and a sickness bred of the mystery of life. If one of the faces I pass daily on the streets disappears, I feel sad; yet they meant nothing to me, other than being a symbol of all life.

Fernando Pessoa