(1888–1935)
Portuguese writer and poet
Fernando Pessoa
Life is a ball of yarn that someone got all tangled. It would make sense if it were rolled up tight, or if it were unrolled and completely stretched out. But such as it is, life is a problem without shape, a confusion of yarn leading nowhere.
The Book of Disquiet (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 287.
Heat, like an article of invisible clothing, makes us want to take it off.
The Book of Disquiet (New York: Pantheon Books, 1991), 43.
Any nostalgia I feel is literary. I remember my childhood with tears, but they’re rhythmic tears, in which prose is already being formed. I remember it as something external, and it comes back to me through external things; I remember only external things. It’s not the stillness of evenings in the country that endears me to the childhood I spent there, it’s the way the table was set for tea, it’s the way the furniture was arranged in the room, it’s the faces and physical gestures of the people. I feel nostalgia for scenes.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (London: Penguin, 2002), 183–84.