The Book of Disquiet (Penguin Modern Classics)

I see life as a roadside inn where I have to stay until the coach from the abyss pulls up.

To feel today what one felt yesterday isn’t to feel – it’s to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be today’s living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost.

I don’t know if it happens only to me or to everyone who, through civilization, has been born a second time. But for me, and perhaps for other people like me, it seems that what’s artificial has become natural, and what’s natural is now strange. Or rather, it’s not that what’s artificial has become natural; it’s simply that what’s natural has chang

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 know no greater pleasure in life than that of being able to sleep. The total snuffing out of life and the soul, the complete banishment of all beings and people, the night without memory or illusion, the absence of past and future

the monotony of my daily life will be like the remembrance of the loves that never came my way and the triumphs that weren’t to be mine.

But there are also moments, such as the one that oppresses me now, when I feel my own self far more than I feel external things, and everything transforms into a night of rain and mud where, lost in the solitude of an out-of-the-way station, I wait interminably for the next third-class train.

Drunk from feeling, I wander as I walk straight ahead.

Because I’m the size of what I see And not the size of my stature.