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"Yes it's me, I myself, what I turned out to be, ( ) I'm the one here in myself, it's me. ( ) Whatever I was, whatever I wasn't-it's all in what I am. Whatever I wanted, whatever I didn't want-all of this has shaped me. Whatever I loved, or stopped loving-in me it's the same nostalgia."
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"The confusion boys experience about their identity is heightened during adolescence. In many ways the fact that today's boy often has a wider range of emotional expression in early childhood, but if forced to suppress emotional awareness later on makes adolescence all the more stressful for boys. Tragically, were it not for the extreme violence that has erupted among teenage boys throughout our nation, the emotional life of boys would still be ignored. Although therapists tell us that mass media images of male violence and domination teach boys that violence is alluring and satisfying, when individual boys are violent, especially when they murder randomly, pundits tend to behave as though it were a mystery why boys are so violent."

"Each of us has no peers, because each of us is unique in who we are and what we have experienced.Anyone who tells you otherwise has quite obviously not met any of their peers either!"

"As I think of myself, so I shall be."

"Either way, you were connected. By your desires. By your defiance. By the simple, complicated fact of who you were."

"I'm not a writer who teaches. I'm a teacher who writes."
Explore more quotes by Fernando Pessoa

"I look at myself but I'm missing. I know myself: it's not me."

"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."

"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."

"Perhaps he still hopes. If there's any justice in the Gods' injustice, then may they let us keep our dreams, even when they're impossible, and may our dreams be happy, even when they're trivial....Every dream is the same dream, for they're all dreams. Let the Gods change my dreams, but not my gift for dreaming."

"There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street. There are images tucked away in books that live more vividly than many men and women. There are phrases from literary works that have a positively human personality. There are passages from my own writing that chill me with fright, so distinctly do I feel them as people, so sharply outlined do they appear against the walls of my room, at night, in shadows... I've written sentences whose sound, read out loud or silently (impossible to hide their sound), can only be of something that acquired absolute exteriority and a full-fledged soul."

"To have opinions is to sell out to yourself. To have no opinion is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet."
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