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.

Decadence is the total loss of unconsciousness, which is the very basis of life. Could it think, the heart would stop beating.

At first I felt dizzy - not with the kind of dizziness that makes the body reel but the kind that's like a dead emptiness in the brain, an instinctive awareness of the void.

My dreams are a stupid refuge, like an umbrella against a thunderbolt.

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.

The principle tragedy of my life is, like all tragedies, an irony of Destiny. I reject real life as if it were a condemnation; I reject dreams as if they were an ignoble liberation. [...]After the end of the stars uselessly whitened in the morning sky and the breeze became less cold in the barely orange tinged in the yellow of the light on the scattered low clouds, I, who hadn't slept, could finally, slowly raise my body, exhausted from nothing from the bed from which I had thought the universe.

Nobody appropriates novelties as readily as the Portuguese.