The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.

Nobody appropriates novelties as readily as the Portuguese.

La literatura es la manera más agradable de ignorar la vida.

Ah, it's my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me!

I wasn’t meant for reality, but life came and found me.

I always live in the present. The future I can't know. The past I no longer have.

What is art but the denial of life?