My happiest hours are those in which I think nothing, want nothing, when I do not even dream, but lose myself in some spurious vegetable torpor, moss growing on the surface of life. Without a trace of bitterness I savour my absurd awareness of being nothing, a mere foretaste of death and extinction.
Fernando PessoaIโve always wanted to be liked. It grieved me that I was treated with indifference. Left an orphan by Fortune, I wantedโlike all orphansโto be the object of someoneโs affection. This need has always been a hunger that went unsatisfied, and so thoroughly have I adapted to this inevitable hunger that I sometimes wonder if I really feel the need to eat. Whatever be the case, life pains me.
Fernando PessoaI am the escaped one, After I was born They locked me up inside me But I left. My soul seeks me, Through hills and valley, I hope my soul Never finds me.
Fernando PessoaThe 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 worldโs existence. All these half-tones of the soulโs consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.
Fernando PessoaI feel closer ties and more intimate bonds with certain characters in books, with certain images Iโve seen in engravings, than with many supposedly real people with the metaphysical absurdity known as โflesh and bloodโ. In fact, โflesh and bloodโ describes them very well: they resemble cuts of meat laid out on the butcherโs marble slab, dead creatures bleeding as though still alive.
Fernando Pessoa