Fernando Pessoa Quotes

Because we are a conglomerate of our experiences - you take away any experience and you take away a piece of identity. You take away a piece of identity and we don't really know who we are.

I suppose identity depends on memory. And if my memory is blotted out, then I wonder if I exist - I mean, if I am the same person. Of course, I don't have to solve that problem. It's up to God, if any.

I am; I was. I want to be.

I know that I have lived because I have felt, and, feeling giving me the knowledge of my existence.

How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past?

Four years and everything was the same, except me.

Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing.

If you live life, then you become what are.

Some people spend their whole lives looking for themselves, yet our self is the one thing we surely cannot lose (how like a cheap philosopher I am become, staying in this benighted place). From the moment we are conceived it is the pattern in our blood and our bones are printed through with it like sticks of seaside rock. Nora, on the other hand, says that she’s surprised anyone knows who they are, considering that every cell and molecule in our bodies has been replaced many times over since we were born.

But I believe above all that I wanted to build the palace of my memory, because my memory is my only homeland.

As Mark Weiner puts it, whether you gain 50 pounds or lose 50 pounds, whether you have a sex change operation for that matter, that it doesn't matter, that there is some part of ourselves that we cannot escape.

Everything we feel is made of Time. All the beauties of life are shaped by it.

As long as I live, I know I'll have feelings. And that's what I'm passionate about.

I am a collection of thoughts and memories and likes and dislikes. I am the things that have happened to me and the sum of everything I've ever done. I am the clothes I wear on my back. I am every place and every person and every object I have ever come across. I am a bag of bones stuck to a very large rock spinning a thousand miles an hour.

I enjoy writing about people falling in love, probably because I think the first time you fall in love is the first time that you have to figure out how you're going to orient your life. What are you going to value? What's going to be most important to you? And I think that's really interesting to write about.

When you're in your early 20s your love life seems to explode every 20 minutes or so. By the time you've reached your thirties, it is every five or ten years.

It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are.

A song can take you to a special time in your life.

History is information. Memory is part of your identity.

After I go out this door, I may only exist in the minds of all my acquaintances…I may be an orange peel.

If you don't know yourself, you don't know your nature. If you don't know your nature, you don't know where to exist. By knowing your nature, knowing yourself, you know what to be and how to live. And that only comes from knowledge of self, knowing yourself.

Who am I? And how, I wonder, will this story end?

I feel different. You know this many times over, because you are a parent, but it transforms you. It's this incredible experience where, in one way, you are still very much yourself, and in some ways you become even more connected to the rest of yourself. All of a sudden, you just get more connected to your child self, and your teenage self, and all these selves that you've maybe been abandoning at every date post that you pass.

History may be servitude. History may be freedom. See, now they vanish. The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them, to become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.

A self is a frightening thing to waste, it's the lens through which one's whole life is viewed, and few people are willing to part with it, in death, or even imaginatively, in art.