Fernando Pessoa Quotes

I wasn’t lonely. I experienced no self-pity. I was just caught up in a life in which I could find no meaning.

I don't think you ever know in yourself whether you have gone mad. You exist in a bubble. There comes a point where you suddenly feel not really a part of the world, you're just passing through.

I stand on the end platform of the tram and am completely unsure of my footing in this world, in this town, in my family. Not even casually could I indicate any claims that I might rightly advance in any direction. I have not even any defense to offer for standing on this platform, holding on to this strap, letting myself be carried along by this tram, nor for the people who give way to the tram or walk quietly along or stand gazing into shop windows. Nobody asks me to put up a defense, indeed, but that is irrelevant.

I felt that I was not, never had been and never would be a living part of this overpoweringly solid and deeply meaningful world around me.

I done me best when I was let. Thinking always if I go all goes. A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles and is there one who understands me? One in a thousand of years of the nights? All me life I have been lived among them but now they are becoming lothed to me. And I am lothing their little warm tricks. And lothing their mean cosy turns. And all the greedy gushes out through their small souls. And all the lazy leaks down over their brash bodies. How small it's all! And me letting on to meself always. And lilting on all the time.

Don't ye know that ev'ry Soul on Earth feels itself to be an Orphan?

The world doesn't understand me and I don't understand the world, that's why I've withdrawn from it.

The irony of our social group is that so often everyone feels this, but there's no company whatsoever in that feeling. Think of Pound's great emphasis, the way out is via the door.

Just having the pain of being alive without anything else, whether it's good or bad. There's a lot of serious songs on the record, you know. That song is just about feeling like a fish out of water, feeling like you don't belong on the planet sometimes.

When not deeply engaged in creative activities, or numbed out by the TV, I felt empty. My heart hurt. I often felt hollow or as if I were some sort of wispy ghost, barely existing.

Sometimes I'm not into being a human.

I understand the power of sorrow, and I understand how far it can take us from ourselves if we let it.

I never ran away, but I was very unhappy as a teenager. I felt like a complete nonentity, and I very tangibly have memories of not wanting to be here - in my body.

I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough

I feel my heart ache, but I've forgotten what that feeling means.

What, then, is that incalculable feeling that deprives the mind of the sleep necessary to life? A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.

In this vast country that he had so loved, he was alone.

Then I realized what separated us: what I thought about him could not reach him; it was psychology, the kind they write about in books. But his judgment went through me like a sword and questioned my very right to exist. And it was true, I had always realized it; I hadn't the right to exist. I had appeared by chance, I existed like a stone, a plant or a microbe. My life put out feelers towards small pleasures in every direction. Sometimes it sent out vague signals; at other times I felt nothing more than a harmless buzzing.

But inside or out, I was alone, and I was beginning to wonder if I always had been, if I always would be.

The loneliness of a one night stand is hard to take.

They were here all at once, but not together. Survival took self-absorption, and it made them strangers with nothing to do and no way to relate. Emergencies gave you a shape and a plot to take part in, while death was no story at all. It left you nothing.

He walked on in silence, the solitary sound of his footsteps echoing in his head, as in a deserted street, at dawn. His solitude was so complete, beneath a lovely sky as mellow and serene as a good conscience, amid that busy throng, that he was amazed at his own existence; he must be somebody else's nightmare, and whoever it was would certainly awaken soon.

Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.

I want to confess as best I can, but my heart is void. The void is a mirror. I see my face and feel loathing and horror. My indifference to men has shut me out. I live now in a world of ghosts, a prisoner in my dreams.