The Book of Disquiet (Penguin Modern Classics)

And since thought, when it shelters emotion, is more demanding than emotion by itself, the regime of consciousness in which I began to live what I felt made how I felt more down-to-earth, more physical, more titillating.

Who even knows what he thinks or wants? Who knows what he is to himself? How many things music suggests, and we’re glad they can never be! How many things the night recalls, and we weep, and they never even were!

I’m tired from having dreamed but not tired of dreaming. No one tires of dreaming, because dreaming is forgetting, and forgetting doesn’t weigh a thing;

The intensity of my sensations has always been less than the intensity of my awareness of them. I’ve always suffered more from my consciousness that I was suffering than from the suffering of which I was conscious.

Why should I care that no one reads what I write? I write to forget about life, and I publish because that’s one of the rules of the game.

It’s human to want what we need, and it’s human to desire what we don’t need but find desirable. Sickness occurs when we desire what we need and what’s desirable with equal intensity, suffering our lack of perfection as if we were suffering for lack of bread.

I read and am liberated. I acquire objectivity. I cease being myself and so scattered. And what I read, instead of being like a nearly invisible suit that sometimes oppresses me, is the external world’s tremendous and remarkable clarity, the sun that sees everyone, the moon that splotches the still earth with shadows, the wide expanses that end in

The beauty of a naked body is only appreciated by cultures that use clothing. Modesty is important for sensuality like resistance for energy.

Few men devoted, like me, to dreaming are lucid enough to laugh at the aesthetic possibility of dreaming of themselves in this way.

I consider it neither a human nor a literary error to attribute a soul to the things we call inanimate. To be a thing is to be the object of an attribution. It may be erroneous to say that a tree feels, that a river runs, that a sunset is sad or that the calm ocean (blue from the sky it doesn’t have) smiles (from the sun outside it). But it’s every