I’m astounded whenever I finish something. Astounded and distressed. My perfectionist instinct should inhibit me from finishing: it should inhibit me from even beginning. But I get distracted and start doing something. What I achieve...

Children are particularly literary, for they say what they feel not what someone has taught them to feel.

A being who, as I grew older, lost imagination, emotion, a type of intelligence, a way of feeling things – all that which, while it made me sorry, did not horrify me. But what am...

What can I expect from myself? My sensation in all their horrible acuity, and a profound awareness of feeling. A sharp mind that only destroys me, and an unusual capacity for dreaming to keep me...

Não sou nada. Nunca serei nada. Não posso querer ser nada. À parte isso, tenho em mim todos os sonhos do mundo.

Há um cansaço da inteligência abstracta, e é o mais horroroso dos cansaços. Não pesa como o cansaço do corpo, nem inquieta como o cansaço do conhecimento pela emoção. É um peso da consciência do...

¡LA fatiga de ser amado, de ser amado de verdad! ¡la fatiga de ser objeto del fardo de las emociones ajenas! Convertir a quien quisiera verse libre, siempre libre, en el chico de los recados...

Bendito sea el elemento irónico de los destinos que concede a los pobres de vida el sueño como pensamiento, así como concedo a los pobres de sueño la vida como pensamiento o el pensamiento como...

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

There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street. There are images tucked away in books that live more vividly than many men and women. There are phrases from literary works...

From so much self-revising, I’ve destroyed myself. From so much self-thinking, I’m now my thoughts and not I

There are moments, such as the one that oppresses me now, when I feel my own self far more than I feel external things, and everything transforms into a night of rain and mud where,...

If I write what I feel, it’s to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.

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...

My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while....

The Complete Work is essentially dramatic, thought it takes different forms – prose passages in this first volume, poems and philosophies in other volumes. It’s the product of the temperament I’ve been blessed or cursed...

I hesitate in everything, often without knowing why. How often I’ve sought – as my own version of the straight line, seeing it in my mind as the ideal straight line – the longest distance...

I’ve dreamed a lot. I’m tired now from dreaming but not tired of dreaming. No one tires of dreaming, because to dream is to forget, and forgetting does not weigh on us, it is a...

Desenrolo-me como uma meada multicolor, ou faço comigo figuras de cordel, como as que se tecem nas mãos espetadas e se passam de umas crianças para as outras. Cuido só de que o polegar não...

Nunca amamos a alguien. Amamos, tan sólo, la idea que nos hacemos de alguien. Es a un concepto nuestro –en suma, es a nosotros mismo– a quien amamos.

La vida es la duda entre una exclamación y una interrogación. En la duda hay un punto final.

I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no...

I feel closer ties and more intimate bonds with certain characters in books, with certain images I’ve seen in engravings, than with many supposedly real people with the metaphysical absurdity known as ‘flesh and blood’....

I don’t complain about the horror of life; I complain about the horror of my life. The only fact I worry about is that I exist and suffer and can’t even dream of being removed...

Everything is interconnected. My readings of classical authors, who never speaks of sunsets, have made many sunsets intelligible to me, in all their colors. There is a relationship between syntactical competence, by which we distinguish...

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...

To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves...

My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.

É preciso que todos os que lidam comigo se convençam de que sou assim, e que exigir-me os sentimentos, aliás muito dignos, de um homem vulgar e banal, é como exigir-me que tenha olhos azuis...

But if the Dream Kings were mine, what would I have to dream about? If I possessed the impossible landscapes, what would remain of the impossible?

I am nothing.I’ll never be anything.I couldn’t want to be something.Apart from that, I have in me all the dreams in the world.

O tédio é, sim, o aborrecimento do mundo, o mal-estar de estar vivendo, o cansaço de se ter vivido; o tédio é, deveras, a sensação carnal da vacuidade prolixa das coisas. Mas o tédio é,...

¡A fatiga de ser amado, de ser amado de verdad! ¡la fatiga de ser objeto del fardo de las emociones ajenas! Convertir a quien quisiera verse libre, siempre libre, en el chico de los recados...

Toda a vida é guerra, e a batalha é, pois, a síntese da vida.

The value of things is not the time they last, but the intensity with which they occur. That is why there are unforgettable moments and unique people!

I can breathe easier now that the appointments are behind me.I missed them all, through deliberate negligence,Having waited for the urge to go, which I knew wouldn’t come.I’m free, and against organized, clothed society.I’m naked...

I don’t even suffer. My disdain for everything is so complete that I even disdain myself. The contempt I have for the sufferings of others I also have for my own. And so all my...

To create, I destroyed myself; I made myself external to such a degree within myself that within myself I do not exist except in an external fashion. I am the living setting in which several...

In me all affections take place on the surface, but sincerely. I’ve always been an actor, and in earnest. Whenever I’ve loved, I’ve pretended to love, pretending it even to myself.

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!

My soul is a black maelstrom, a great madness spinning about a vacuum, the swirling of a vast ocean around a hole in the void, and in the waters, more like whirlwinds than waters, float...

Convicções profundas só as têm as criaturas superficiais. Os que não reparam para as coisas quase que as veem apenas para não esbarrar com elas, esses são sempre da mesma opinião, são os íntegros e...

And leaning on the windowsill to enjoy the day, gazing at the variegated mass of the whole city, just one thought fills my soul: that I profoundly wish to die, to cease, to see no...

Ah, it’s my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me!

Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the material world and, since it is the spirit that travels, it is the spirit that is experienced. That is...

Te quiero solo como un sueño.

Quantas vezes os tenho ouvido dizer a mesma frase que simboliza todo o absurdo, todo o nada, toda a insciência falada das suas vidas. É aquela frase que usam de qualquer prazer material: «é o...

To be great, be whole;Exclude nothing, exaggerate nothing that is not you.Be whole in everything. Put all you areInto the smallest thing you do.So, in each lake, the moon shines with splendorBecause it blooms up...

Freedom is the possibility of isolation. You are free if you can withdraw from people, not having to seek them out for the sake of money, company, love, glory or curiosity, none of which can...

I have a very simple morality: not to do good or evil to anyone. Not to do evil, because it seems only fair that others enjoy the same right I demand for myself – not...