Quotes on Book Of Disquiet

Friends: not one. Just a few acquaintances who imagine they feel something for me and who might be sorry if a train ran over me and the funeral was on a rainy day.

Everything around me is evaporating. My whole life, my memories, my imagination and its contents, my personality - it's all evaporating. I continuously feel that I was someone else, that I felt something else, that I thought something else. What I'm attending here is a show with another set. And the show I'm attending is myself.

And I have the others in me. Even when I’m far away from them, I am forced to live with them. Even when I’m all alone, crowds surround me. I have no place to flee to, unless I were to flee from myself.

Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.

To have opinions is to sell out to youself. To have no opinions is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet.

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.

We worship perfection because we can't have it; if we had it, we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect.

I don't mourn the loss of my childhood; I mourn because everything, including (my) childhood, is lost.

I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.

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 Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.

Could it think, the heart would stop beating.

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

The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.

Art consists in making others feel what we feel.

Everything interests me, but nothing holds me.

Being tired of all illusions and of everything about illusions – the loss of illusions, the uselessness of having them, the prefatigue of having to have them in order to lose them, the sadness of having had them, the intellectual shame of having had them knowing that they would have to end this way.

I sometimes think that I enjoy suffering. But the truth is I would prefer something else.

But do we really live? To live without knowing what life is - is that living?

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

I bear the wounds of all the battles I avoided.

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.