But someone afflicted by tedium feels himself the prisoner of a futile freedom, in a cell of infinite size.
It’s the fact that in all this – sky, earth, world – there is never anything but myself!
Sovereign King of Detachment and Renunciation, Emperor of Death and Shipwreck, living dream that gradually wanders among the worlds ruins and wastes!
What are ideals but an admission that life is worthless? What is art but the negation of life?
I’ve created various personalities within. I constantly create personalities. Each of my dreams, as soon as I start dreaming it, is immediately incarnated in another person, who is then the one dreaming it, and not I.
Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful – only then do I find myself and feel comforted.
I cultivate hatred of action like a greenhouse flower.
It was in a certain sense home – the place, that is, where one doesn’t feel.
And I, I myself, am the centre that exists only because the geometry of the abyss demands it; I am the nothing around which all this spins, I exist so that it can spin, I am a centre that exists only because every circle has one. I, I myself, am the well in which the walls have fallen away to leave only viscous slime. I am the centre of everything surrounded by the great nothing.
The only way to survive in this world is by keeping alive our dream, without ever fulfilling it, since the fulfilment never measures up to what we imagine.
Vicente Guedes endured his empty life with masterly indifference, the foundations of his mental attitude being built on the stoicism of the weak.
I do not even abdicate from the banal gestures of life from which I so wish I could abdicate. Abdication takes effort, and I do not have enough soul to make that effort.
A ship may seem to be an object whose purpose is to sail, but no, its purpose is to reach a port.
Understanding is what wearies us most of all. To live is to not think.
I love you the way I love the sunset or the moonlight: I want the moment to remain, but all I want to possess in it is the sensation of possessing it.
The universe isn’t mine: it’s me. 139.
I don’t complain about the horrors of life. I complain only about the horrors of my life. The only important fact for me is the fact that I exist and that I suffer and cannot entirely dream myself out of feeling that suffering.
Where can one think of fleeing, if the cell is everything? And.
But if God is the flowers and trees And hills and sun and moon, Then why should I call him God? I’ll call him flowers and trees and hills and sun and moon.
The right way to live is something we can only teach the dead.