Fernando Pessoa Quotes

It's a brooding melancholy that haunts me.

Every man is crucified upon the cross of himself.

I looked below and saw my people there, and all were well and happy except one, and he was lying like the dead - and that one was myself.

I'm half alive but I feel mostly dead.

It's raining my soul, it's raining, but it's raining dead eyes.

The darkest moments for me weren't necessarily winding up in the hospital or anything like that. It was those quiet moments alone when I just hated the person I had become.

It's really hard to watch yourself.

I've always been at war with myself, for right or wrong. I don't know how to explain it more. It's universal. Some people are better at dealing with it, and they sleep with no pain - not pain, arguments. I've grown quite comfortable with being at war.

Do I have a cold heart? Some say.

When you're living a lie, the scariest thing is to be alone with your thoughts.

Even now, as I write this, I can still feel that tightness. And I want you to feel it--the wind coming off the river, the waves, the silence, the wooded frontier. You're at the bow of a boat on the Rainy River. You're twenty-one years old, you're scared, and there's a hard squeezing pressure in your chest. What would you do? Would you jump? Would you feel pity for yourself? Would you think about your family and your childhood and your dreams and all you're leaving behind? Would it hurt? Would it feel like dying? Would you cry, as I did?

The mind is its own beautiful prisoner. Mind looked long at the sticky moon opening in dusk her new wings then decently hanged himself,one afternoon. The last thing he saw was you naked amid unnaked things.

People tell me it's a sin, to know and feel too much within.

Days go by when I do nothing but underline the damp edge of myself.

A discordant mind, black with confusion and despair, would finish me off as thoroughly as the cold.

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.

I am gay on the outside, especially among my own folk (I count Poles my own); but inside something gnaws at me; some presentiment, anxiety, dreams - or sleeplessness - melancholy, indifference - desire for life, and the next instant, desire for death; some kind of sweet peace, some kind of numbness, absent-mindedness.

My neediness is not a hole to be filled but something beneath the skin scratching to get out.

Tally turned away. Five minutes was suddenly too long to stand here, eyes burning, unable to cry.

I balance things better and don't kill myself so much, but conflict makes me a more interesting actress to watch. The places I go to pull emotions from, I think if you have a perfect, happy life, you just don't have those places. And I want those places. I'm proud of those places.

I am always with myself, and it is I who am my tormentor.

We burn so hard, but we shed so little light; it makes us crazy and sad.

By his monstrous way of life he seemed to have put himself beyond the limits of reality. Nothing moved him or spoke to him from the real world unless he heard it in an echo of the infuriated cries within him.

When I look at my life and its secret colors, I feel like bursting into tears.

I told myself that if I didn't care, this wouldn't have hurt so much - surely that proved I was alive and human and all those touchy-feely things, for once and for all. But that wasn't a relief, not when I felt like a skyscraper with dynamite on every floor.