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"There are moments, such as the one that oppresses me now, when I feel my own self far more than I feel external things, and everything transforms into a night of rain and mud where, lost in the solitude of an out-of-the-way station, I wait interminably for the next third-class train."
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"To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion? There is nobody-here among these grey arches, and moaning pigeons, and cheerful games and tradition and emulation, all so skilfully organised to prevent feeling alone."

"The old gal was only another lonely creature in a world that didn't care."

"I had gotten so used to being alone, but never entirely used to it. Never used to it enough to stop wanting the alternative."

"I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude."

"I love my loneliness as it helps me gather strength to deal with people."

"He sat beside the window in the dark, with his eyes closed. Hearing to the sound of the rain. The whisky in his glass burnt his throat, while the smoke of his cigarette filled his lungs and the fire inside his heart consumed his soul slowly."
Explore more quotes by Fernando Pessoa

"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 Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful - only then do I find myself and feel comforted."

"Everything that happens where we live happens in us. Everything that ceases in what we see ceases in us. Everything that has been, if we saw it when it was, was taken from us when it went away."

"What can I expect from myself? My sensation in all their horrible acuity, and a profound awareness of feeling. A sharp mind that only destroys me, and an unusual capacity for dreaming to keep me entertained. A dead will and a reflection that cradles it, like a living child."

"Giving importance to what we think because we thought it, taking our own selves not only (to quote the Greek philosopher) as the measure of all things but as their norm or standard, we create in ourselves, if not an interpretation, at least a criticism of the universe, which we don't even know and therefore cannot criticize. The giddiest, most weak-minded of us then promote that criticism to an interpretation that's superimposed, like a hallucination; induced rather than deduced. It's a hallucination in the strict sense, being an illusion based on something only dimly seen."

"I never paid any attention to people who told me to go out and live. I belonged always to whatever was far from me and to whatever I could never be. Anything that was not mine, however base, always seemed to me to be full of poetry. The only thing I ever loved was pure nothingness."

"All letters of love are Ridiculous. They wouldn't be love letters if they were not Ridiculous."

"I'm almost convinced that I'm never awake. I'm not sure if I'm not in fact dreaming when I live, and living when I dream, or if dreaming and living are for me intersected, intermingled things that together form my conscious self."

"Everything is absurd.1 man spends his life earning money which he then saves even though he has no children 2 leave it 2. another puts all his efforts into becoming famous so that he'll b remembered once dead, yet he doesn't believe in a survival of the soul that would give him knowledge of that fame. yet another wears himself out looking 4 things he doesn't even like."
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