The Book of Disquiet Quotes

“My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while. […]. I’m two, and both keep their distance — Siamese twins that aren’t attached.”

“We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It’s our own concept—our own selves—that we love.”

“I’ve dreamed a lot. I’m tired now from dreaming but not tired of dreaming. No one tires of dreaming, because to dream is to forget, and forgetting does not weigh on us, it is a dreamless sleep throughout which we remain awake. In dreams I have achieved everything.”

“I wasn’t meant for reality, but life came and found me.”

“Everything around me is evaporating. My whole life, my memories, my imagination and its contents, my personality - it’s all evaporating. I continuously feel that I was someone else, that I felt something else, that I thought something else. What I’m attending here is a show with another set. And the show I’m attending is myself.”

“I’ve always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I’m not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect”

“I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.”

“We worship perfection because we can’t have it; if we had it, we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect.”

“I’d woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.”

“There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful.”

“I’ve never done anything but dream. This, and this alone, has been the meaning of my life. My only real concern has been my inner life.”

“If I write what I feel, it’s to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.”

“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”

“My past is everything I failed to be.”

“My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.”