“Everything stated or expressed by man is a note in the margin of a completely erased text. From what's in the note we can extract the gist of what must have been in the text, but there's always a doubt, and the possible meanings are many.”

Fernando Pessoa

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Quote by Fernando Pessoa: “Everything stated or expressed by man is a note … - Image 1

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“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.”


“Everything that happens where we live happens in us. Everything that ceases in what we see ceases in us. Everything that has been, if we saw it when it was, was taken from us when it went away.”


“In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of them seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do not recognize myself in them. There was a person who wrote them, and it was I. I experienced them, but it was in another life, from which I just woke up, as if from someone else's dream.”


“I had the same sensation as when we watch someone sleep. When asleep we all become children again. Perhaps because in the state of slumber we can do no wrong and are unconscious of life, the greatest criminal and most self- absorbed egotist are holy, by a natural magic, as long as they're sleeping. For me there's no discernible difference between killing a child and killing a sleeping man.”


“I've always been an ironic dreamer, unfaithful to my inner promises.Like a complete outsider, a casual observer of whom I thought I was,I've always enjoyed watching my daydreams go down in defeat.I was never convinced of what I believed in.I filled my hands with sand, called it gold, and opened them up to let it slide through.Words were my only truth.When the right words were said, all was done; the rest was the sand that had always been.”


“As I walk, I construct perfect sentences that I cannot remember later at home. I don’t know if the ineffable poetry of those sentences derived from what they were or from their never having been (written).”