Posts tagged fernando pessoa
A novel is a story of what never was, and a play is a novel without narration. A poem is the expression of ideas or feelings in a language no one uses, because no one talks in verse.
—Fernando Pessoa, from The Book of Disquiet; picture from Breathless
Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.
—Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
Photograph by Andre Kertesz
I unroll myself in sentences and paragraphs, I punctuate myself. In my arranging and rearranging of images I’m like a child using newspaper to dress up as a king, and in the way I create rhythm with a series of words I’m like a lunatic adorning my hair with dried flowers that are still alive in my dreams.
—Fernando Pessoa, from The Book of Disquiet
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.
If they want me to be a mystic, fine. I’m a mystic.
I’m a mystic, but only of the body.
My soul is simple and doesn’t think.
My mysticism is not wanting to know.
It’s living without thinking about it.
I don’t know what Nature is. I sing it.
I live on a hilltop
In a solitary whitewashed cabin.
And that’s my definition.
—Fernando Pessoa
Picture from Last Life in the Universe
What I made of myself, I shouldn’t have,
And what I could have made of myself, I didn’t.
—Fernando Pessoa writing as Álvaro de Campos, Tobacco Shop
Picture: Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past
“As my feet wander I inwardly skim, without reading, a book of text interspersed with swift images, from which I leisurely form an idea that’s never completed.”
—Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
Homing Ship by Andre Kertesz
I’m nothing.
I’ll always be nothing.
Not that I want to be nothing…
But aside from that, I contain all the dreams of the world within me.
—Fernando Pessoa writing as Álvaro de Campos, Tobacco Shop
picture from Shoot the Piano Player
