Fernando Pessoa Quotes About Books

Quotes about: Books

• I'm astounded whenever I finish something. Astounded and distressed. My perfectionist instinct should inhibit me from finishing; it should inhibit me from even beginning. But I get distracted and start doing something. What I achieve is not the product of an act of my will but of my will's surrender. I begin because I don't have the strength to think; I finish because I don't have the courage to quit. This book is my cowardice.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Book, Writing, Thinking

  "The Book of Disquiet".

• I am the outskirts of some non-existent town, the long-winded prologue to an unwritten book. I'm nobody, nobody. I don't know how to feel or think or love. I'm a character in a novel as yet unwritten, hovering in the air and undone before I've even existed, amongst the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breath life into me.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Dream, Book, Character

  Fernando Pessoa (2010). “The Book of Disquiet”, p.24, Profile Books

• Never read a book to the end, nor even in sequence and without skipping.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Book, Advice, Ends

• What's given, in fact, always depends on the person or thing it's given to. A minor incident in the street brings the cook to the door and entertains him more than I would be entertained by contemplating the most original idea, by reading the greatest book, or by having the most gratifying of useless dreams. If life is basically monotony, he has escaped it more than I. And he escapes it more easily than I. The truth isn't with him or with me, because it isn't with anyone, but happiness does belong to him.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Dream, Reading, Book

• 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. From, The Book of Disquiet

  Fernando Pessoa

  Dream, Children, Book

• What has happened to us has happened to everyone or only to us; if to everyone, then it's no novelty, and if only to us, then it won't be understood.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Book, Novelty, Understood

  "The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa".

• My hapless peers with their lofty dreams--how I envy and despise them! I'm with the others, the even more hapless, who have no-one but themselves to whom they can tell their dreams and show what would be verses if they wrote them. I'm with those poor slobs who have no books to show, who have no literature beside their own soul, and who are suffocating to death due to the fact that they exist without having taken that mysterious, transcendental exam that makes one eligible to live.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Dream, Book, Taken

• 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

  Fernando Pessoa

  Hurt, Book, Imagination

  Fernando Pessoa (2002). “The Book of Disquiet”, p.155, Penguin UK

• I am the suburb of a non-existent town, the prolix commentary on a book never written. I am nobody, nobody. I am a character in a novel which remains to be written, and I float, aerial, scattered without ever having been, among the dreams of a creature who did not know how to finish me off.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Dream, Book, Character

  Fernando Pessoa, Iain Watson (1991). “The book of disquiet: a selection”, Quartet Encounters

• I feel closer ties and more intimate bonds with certain characters in books, with certain images I’ve seen in engravings, than with many supposedly real people with the metaphysical absurdity known as ‘flesh and blood’. In fact, ‘flesh and blood’ describes them very well: they resemble cuts of meat laid out on the butcher’s marble slab, dead creatures bleeding as though still alive.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Real, Book, Character

  Fernando Pessoa (2010). “The Book of Disquiet”, p.47, Profile Books

• Let's buy books so as not to read them; let's go to concerts without caring to hear the music or see who's there; let's take long walks because we're sick of walking; and let's spend whole days in the country, just because it bores us.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Country, Book, Caring

  Fernando Pessoa (2002). “The Book of Disquiet”, p.49, Penguin UK

• Destiny gave me only two things: a few accounting books and the gift of dreaming.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Dream, Book, Destiny

  "The Book of Disquiet". Book by Fernando Pessoa, 1982.

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