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Kindle Notes & Highlights
one who hopes for nothing because all hope is vain.
all hope is vain.
it’s the fate of everyone in this life to be exploited,
Some, the prophets and saints who walk this vacuous world, are exploited by God himself.
exploited by God
it’s my destiny to remain a book-keeper for ever and for poetry and literature to remain simply butterflies that alight on my head and merely underline my own ridiculousness by their very beauty.
pessoa's destiny
his smile, a broad, human smile, warm as the applause of a large crowd.
smile ~ applause
I am the centre of everything surrounded by the great nothing.
centre of everything
Everything is us and we are everything, but what is the point if everything is nothing?
everything is nothing
The wise man makes his life monotonous, for then even the tiniest incident becomes imbued with great significance.
minute moments of myriadness in the mamoth mists of monotony
One must monotonize existence in order to rid it of monotony. One must make the everyday so anodyne that the slightest incident proves entertaining.
todo
If I possessed the impossible landscapes, what would remain of the impossible?
what if
Because I am nothing, I can imagine myself to be anything.
hope is a purely literary feeling.
hope
Men and objects share a common abstract destiny: to be of equally insignificant value in the algebra of life’s mystery.
Check out this quote from the book of disquiet
diverse monotony
If only, I feel now, if only I could be someone able to see all this as if he had no other relation with it than that of seeing it, someone able to observe everything as if he were an adult traveller newly arrived today on the surface of life! If only one had not learned, from birth onwards, to give certain accepted meanings to everything, but instead was able to see the meaning inherent in each thing rather than that imposed on it from without. If only one could know the human reality of the woman selling fish and go beyond just labelling her a fishwife and the known fact that she exists and
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what i wish to see
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 that metaphysical absurdity known as ‘flesh and blood’. In fact ‘flesh and blood’ describes them very well: they resemble cuts of meat laid out on the butcher’s marble slab, dead creatures bleeding as though still alive, the sirloin steaks and cutlets of Fate.
closer ties to fictional characters
