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Quotes by Portuguese Authors
"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."
"I've witnessed, incognito, the gradual collapse of my life, the slow foundering of all I wanted to be. I can say, with a truth that needs no flowers to show it's dead, that there's nothing I've wanted - and nothing in which I've placed, even for a moment, the dream of only that moment - that hasn't disintegrated below my windows like a clod of dirt that resembled stone until it fell from a flowerpot on a high balcony. It would even seem that Fate has always tried to make me love or want things just so that it could show me, on the very next day, that I didn't have and could never have them."
"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."
"If after I die, people want to write my biography, there is nothing simpler. They only need two dates: the date of my birth and the date of my death. Between one and another, every day is mine."
"Blessed are the ones who offer coffee to writers, for they will get all the rewards mentioned in the Bible, the Quran, the Vedas, the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita."
"Those that think banks and governments are making them poor haven't seen the whole picture. Poverty is the act of trusting their system."
"Most people believe that sharing the same flesh and blood, the same basic DNA structure, makes them your family. How sad that is. Because, you see, as a spiritual person, I believe you must deserve a family, not just own it. If those that are my family, don't behave as such, they are not my family. If I have chosen them before I was born, I have been betrayed. I owe them nothing, in this or the many lives to come. In fact, if they betray me in this life, they will return as my enemies in the next. And their karma will make me victorious in that future confrontation."
"There's a non-existent peace in the uncertain quietness."
"Enlightenment isn't the end but the beginning, the start of a journey that a small group of people begun while the rest sleeps."
"Very often it seems that people assume that by cutting the wings of others, it becomes easier to love them. They know so little about love that end up creating a perception of love that is devilish and demoniacal. And I end with no other choice but to remain single and let them go."
"Most people think that making a living from books is fun or joyful, but there's much more to it than what the eyes can see, and I wish I had more time for more profitable and also joyful activities."
"All letters of love are Ridiculous. They wouldn't be love letters if they were not Ridiculous."
"After one my breakups, my former girlfriend said we have misunderstandings. We never had. It's just that I was living for the future while she was living for the tomorrow. I couldn't wait for someone unwilling to grow up and able to keep only short term promises."
"This worship of Humanity, with its rituals of Liberty and Equality, always struck me as like being a revival of the ancient cults, in which animals were gods or the gods bore the heads of animals."
"Whoever decides to hate others has chosen to walk alone."
"I have seen enough. I am ready to see the world die."
"God operates in levels. First He changes your life to help you see opportunities, and you can't appreciate it. Then He sends you people that can help you, and you refuse to trust them. Then, He boosts your vitality, so that you might still be able to do something for yourself, but you conform to your lifestyle and habits. Then, He ignores you, until you realize, through your own suffering, that you've offended Him in all these ways."
"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."
"Through an experience that simultaneously involved my sensibility and intelligence, I realized early on that the imaginative life, however morbid it might seem, is the one that suits temperaments like mine. The fictions of my imagination (as it later developed) may weary me, but they don't hurt or humiliate. Impossible lovers can't cheat on us, or smile at us falsely, or be calculating in their caresses. They never forsake us, and they don't die or disappear. --The book of Disquiet."
"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."
"Lord, may the pain be ours, And the weakness that it brings, But at least give us the strength, Of not showing it to anyone!"
"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."
"And suddenly, from behind me, I hear the metaphysically abrupt arrival of the office boy. I feel like I could kill him for barging in on what I wasn't thinking. I turn around and look at him with a silence full of hatred, tense with latent homicide, my mind already hearing the voice he'll use to tell me something or other. He smiles from the other side of the room and says 'Good afternoon' in a loud voice. I hate him like the universe. My eyes are sore from imagining."
"Sickness occurs when we desire what we need and what's desirable with equal intensity, suffering our lack of perfection as if we were suffering for lack of bread."
"If the heart could think it would stop beating."
"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."
"At the end of this day there remains what remained yesterday and what will remain tomorrow: the insatiable, unquantifiable longing to be both the same and other."
"The rustic, the reader of novels, the pure ascetic: these three are truly happy men."
"Ask the person who found you about what kind of people she was looking for before meeting you, as she may not know that she has found one of them already."
"I had the same sensation as when we watch someone sleep. When asleep we all become children again. Perhaps because in the state of slumber we can do no wrong and are unconscious of life, the greatest criminal and most self- absorbed egotist are holy, by a natural magic, as long as they're sleeping. For me there's no discernible difference between killing a child and killing a sleeping man."
"Isn't joyful or painful this pain in which I rejoice."
"In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of them seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do not recognize myself in them. There was a person who wrote them, and it was I. I experienced them, but it was in another life, from which I just woke up, as if from someone else's dream."
"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."
"My soul is a black maelstrom, a great madness spinning about a vacuum, the swirling of a vast ocean around a hole in the void, and in the waters, more like whirlwinds than waters, float images of all I ever saw or heard in the world: houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and fragments of voices, all caught up in a sinister, bottomless whirlpool."
"A boat would seem to be an object whose one purpose is to travel, but its real purpose is not to travel but to reach harbour. We found ourselves on the high seas, with no idea of which port we should be aiming for."
"Is it that my habit of placing myself in the souls of other people makes me see myself as others see or would see me if they noticed my presence there? It is. And once I've perceived what they would feel about me if they knew me, it is as if they were feeling and expressing it at that very moment. It is a torture to me to live with other people. Then there are those who live inside me. Even when removed from life, I'm forced to live with them. Alone, I am hemmed in by multitudes. I have nowhere to flee to, unless I were to flee myself."
"A person that doesn't read and doesn't have any ethics complaining about a writer feels like a Chihuahua barking at a Rottweiler."
"Unblessed are the hypocrites who are proud of their Christianity but fear the devil."
"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."
"Like every dreamer, I've always felt that my calling was to create. Since I've never been able to make an effort or carry out an intention, creation for me has always meant dreaming, wanting or desiring, and action has meant desiring of the acts I wish I could perform."
"It is a rule of life that we can and must learn from everyone. There are serious matters in life to be learned from charlatans and bandits, there are philosophies to be gleaned from fools, real lessons of fortitude that come to us by chance and from those who depend on chance. Everything contains everything else."
"My decision isn't as important as the freedom to decide. And my income isn't as important as what I do to earn it."
"Everything that you want in life, is possible. But the reflection in the mirror will always show who is reflecting. One can't change the reflection without changing himself."
"In times of war, as in life, surround yourself with people of value, virtue and high morals, because it's always better to lose, perish and vanish in glory than to live in shame."
"To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves and factitious vanities, the wiles of our digestion and forgetfulness, people squirming - like worms when a rock is lifted - under the huge abstract boulder of the meaningless blue sky."
"A being who, as I grew older, lost imagination, emotion, a type of intelligence, a way of feeling things - all that which, while it made me sorry, did not horrify me. But what am I experiencing when I read myself as if I were someone else? On which bank am I standing if I see myself in the depths?"
"To need to dominate others is to need others. The commander is dependent."
"In this world we're all travelers on the same ship that has set sail from one unknown port en route to another equally foreign to us, we should treat each other therefore with the friendliness due to fellow travelers."
"With slight misconceptions of reality we fabricate our hopes and beliefs, and we live off crusts that we call cakes, like poor children who make-believe they're happy."
"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."
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