Unexpected Consequences Quotes

“I didn't want to feel life or to touch anything real, for the experience of my temperament in contact with the world had taught me that the sensation of life was always painful to me. But in isolating myself to avoid that contact, I exacerbated my already overwrought sensibility. If it were possible to cut off completely all contact with things, then my sensibility would pose no problem. But this total isolation cannot be achieved. However little I do, I still breathe; however little I act, I still move. And so, having exacerbated my sensibility through isolation, I found that the tiniest things, wich even for me had been perfectly innocuous, began to wrack me like a catastrophe. I chose the wrong method of escape. I fled via an uncomfortable and roundabout route to end up at the same place I'd started from, with the fatigue of my journey added to the horror of living there.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet