“AutopsychographyThe poet is a man who feignsAnd feigns so thoroughly, at lastHe manages to feign as painThe pain he really feels,And those who read what once he wroteFeel clearly, in the pain they read,Neither of the pains he felt,Only a pain they cannot sense.And thus, around its jolting trackThere runs, to keep our reason busy,The circling clockwork train of oursThat men agree to call a heart.”

“Isn't joyful or painful this pain in which I rejoice”

“I’ve always wanted to be liked. It grieved me that I was treated with indifference. Left an orphan by Fortune, I wanted—like all orphans—to be the object of someone’s affection. This need has always been a hunger that went unsatisfied, and so thoroughly have I adapted to this inevitable hunger that I sometimes wonder if I really feel the need to eat.Whatever be the case, life pains me.”

“Lord, may the pain be ours, And the weakness that it brings, But at least give us the strength, Of not showing it to anyone!”

“There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful.”

“That’s why I read, as a stranger,My being as if it were pages.Not knowing what will comeAnd forgetting what has passed,I note in the margin of my reading What I thought I felt. Rereading, I wonder: “Was that me?”God knows, because he wrote it.”

“I am the nothingness around which this movement spins, the only reason it spins, not that the center exists except in the fact that all circles have a center. I, really I, am the well without walls, but with the sliminess of its walls, the center of everything with the nothingness around it.”