The Book of Disquiet (Penguin Modern Classics)

Having employed my self-awareness in such a purely artistic way, and having become so completely external to myself, I sometimes no longer recognize myself. Who am I behind this unreality? I don’t know. I must be someone. And if I avoid living, acting and feeling, then believe me, it’s so as not to tamper with the contours of my invented personalit

Two or three days like the beginning of love… The value of this for the aesthete is in the feelings it produces. To go further would be to enter the realm of jealousy, suffering and anxiety. In this antechamber of emotion there’s all the sweetness of love – hints of pleasure, whiffs of passion – without any of its depth. If this means giving up the

I’m oppressed by the very self that encases me,

As our body lives in length, in breadth and in height, it may be that our dreams live in the ideal, in the ego and in space – in space through their visible representation, in the ideal through their non-material essence, and in the ego through their personal dimension as something intimately ours. The ego itself, the I in each one of us, is perhap

My worst sorrows have evaporated when I’ve opened the window on to the street of my dreams* and forgotten myself in what I saw there.

I can easily understand women who embroider out of sorrow or who crochet because life exists. My elderly aunt would play solitaire throughout the endless evening. These confessions of what I feel are my solitaire.

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

It was an occasion to be happy. But something weighed on me, some inscrutable yearning, an indefinable and perhaps even noble desire. Perhaps it was just taking me a long time to feel alive. And when I leaned out my high window, looking down at the street I couldn’t see, I suddenly felt like one of those damp rags used for house-cleaning that are t

These people are happy, for they’ve been given the enchanted dream of stupidity. But those, like me, who’ve been given dreams without illusions .....

The creation of something complete and whole, be it good or bad – and if it’s never entirely good, it’s very often not all bad – yes, the creation of something complete seems to stir in me above all a feeling of envy. A completed thing is like a child; although imperfect like everything human, it belongs to us like our own children.