Alexandra Barreiros > Alexandra's Quotes

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise.”
― F.Scott Fitzgerald

“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“I mean that you always know what results will come from one or another of your actions; but in a strange way you want to do one thing and get the result that could only come from another”
― P.D. Ouspensky, Strange Life of Ivan Osokin

“There is something in us that keeps us where we find ourselves. I think this is the most awful thing of all.”
― P.D. Ouspensky, Strange Life of Ivan Osokin

“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.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“I don't think all writers are sad, she said. I think it's the other way around- all sad people write.”
― Lang Leav

“What I see, what I see. What I see is the day in all its absurdity and triviality.”
― Joseph Roth

“The Platonic idealist is the man by nature so wedded to perfection that he sees in everything not the reality but the faultless ideal which the reality misses and suggests.”
― George Santayana

“Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage.”
― Theodor W. Adorno