Fernando Pessoa (1888 – 1935)
Portuguese poet and writer, most of whose work was published posthumously.
It's certain that, when hearing from any of those people the story of their sexual marathons, a vague suspicion pervades us, at about the seventh deflowering.
I exempt you of being present in my idea of you.
If a man can only write well when drunk, I'll tell him: get drunk. And if he tells me that his liver suffers with it, I'll answer: what's your liver? It's a dead thing that lives as long as you live, and the poems you'll write will live without a as long as.
Caeiro unterläuft die Unterscheidung zwischen dem Schein und dem, was etwa "Denkerge-danken" hinter ihm ausmachen wollen. Die Dinge, wie er sie sieht, sind als was sie scheinen. Sein Pan-Deismus basiert auf einer Ding-Metaphysik, die in der modernen Dichtung des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts noch Schule machen sollte.
Here lies, in the small extreme beach, the Captain Of The End.
To stagnate in the sun, goldenly, like an obscure lake surrounded by flowers.
For I am the size of what I see
not my height's size.
Then a overflowing desire comes to me, absurd, of a sort of satanism before Satan, in that one day [...] an escape out of God can be found and the deepest of us stops, I don't know how, to be a part of being or not being.
Yes, talking to people makes me sleepy.
They bring me faith like a closed package in someone else's plate. They want me to accept it so that I don't open it.
Attention to detail and a perfectionist instinct, far from stimulating action, are character qualities that lead to renunciation. Better to dream than to be.
You breathe better when you're rich.
Yet I have no stylistic nobility. My head aches because my head aches. The universe aches me because my head aches.
Fernando Pessoa is the greatest Portuguese poet since Vax de Camoes, of the Renaissance. He established modernism in Portugal and deeply influenced the language. It is said that even Lisbon chambermaids speak differently from their grandparents because of him.
Myth is the nothing that is everything.
There are those that even God exploits, and they are prophets and saints in the vacuousness of the world.
Sailing is necessary, living is not necessary.
[Pessoa was] Portugal's greatest writer of the twentieth century [though] some critics would even leave off that last qualifying phrase. [He was] one of the most appealing European modernists, equal in command and range to his contemporaries Rilke and Mandelstam.
We never love someone. We just love the idea we have of someone. It's a concept of ours - summing up, ourselves - that we love.
I pass times, I pass silences, formless worlds pass me by.