Quotes by "Fernando Pessoa"

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.

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.

My past is everything I failed to be.

Time, which grays hair and wrinkles faces, also withers violent affections, and much more quickly.

Night will fall on us all and the coach will pull up.

Everything stated or expressed by man is a note in the margin of a completely erased text. From what's in the note we can extract the gist of what must have been in the text, but there's always a doubt, and the possible meanings are many.

I know of no pleasure like that of books, yet I read very little. Books are the entryway to dreams, but people at ease in life don’t need such introductions to enter into conversation with dreams. I could never read a book and give myself over to it; always, with each step, the commentary of my intellect or my imagination interrupts the narrative sequence. After some minutes I am the one who writes and the writing is nowhere to be seen.

Look, there's no metaphysics on earth like chocolates.