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“Never forget that solitude is my lot ... I implore those who love me to love my solitude."

(Letter to Mimi Romanelli, May 11, 1910)”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke, a Soul History: In the Image of Orpheus

“Ah ki ah! Beni darmadağın eden ve bunalımlara sürükleyen, olabileceğim o öteki kişiye duyduğum bu özlem işte!”
― Pessoa Fernando, The Book of Disquiet

“If Wagner's yearning endlessly seeks resolution, Scriabin is on a search for the yearning itself: Who needs a resolution when the longing provides such ecstasy?”
― Lincoln Ballard, The Alexander Scriabin Companion: History, Performance, and Lore

“To live a dispassionate and cultured life in the open air of ideas, reading, dreaming and thinking of writing -- a life so slow it constantly verges on tedium, but pondered enough never to find itself there. To live this life far from emotions and thought, living it only in the thought of emotions and in the emotion of thoughts. To goldenly stagnate in the sun, like a murky pond surrounded by flowers. To possess, in the shade, that nobility of spirit that makes no demands on life. To be in the whirl of the worlds like dust of flowers, sailing through the afternoon air on an unknown wind and falling, in the torpor of dusk, wherever it falls, lost among larger things. To be this with a sure understanding, neither happy nor sad, grateful to the sun for its brilliance and to the stars for their remoteness. To be no more, have no more, want no more... The music of the hungry beggar, the song of the blind man, the relic of the unknown wayfarer, the tracks in the desert of the camel without burden or destination...”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“To understand, I destroyed myself. To understand is to forget about loving. I know nothing more simultaneously false and telling than the statement by Leonardo da Vinci that we cannot love or hate something until we’ve understood it.

Solitude devastates me; company oppresses me. The presence of another person derails my thoughts; I dream of the other’s presence with a strange absent-mindedness that no amount of my analytical scrutiny can define.
Isolation has carved me in its image and likeness. The presence of another person – of any person whatsoever – instantly slows down my thinking, and while for a normal man contact with others is a stimulus to spoken expression and wit, for me it is a counterstimulus, if this compound word be linguistically permissible. When all by myself, I can think of all kinds of clever remarks, quick comebacks to what no one said, and flashes of witty sociability with nobody. But all of this vanishes when I face someone in the flesh: I lose my intelligence, I can no longer speak, and after half an hour I just feel tired. Yes, talking to people makes me feel like sleeping. Only my ghostly and imaginary friends, only the conversations I have in my dreams, are genuinely real and substantial, and in them intelligence gleams like an image in a mirror.

The mere thought of having to enter into contact with someone else makes me nervous. A simple invitation to have dinner with a friend produces an anguish in me that’s hard to define. The idea of any social obligation whatsoever – attending a funeral, dealing with someone about an office matter, going to the station to wait for someone I know or don’t know – the very idea disturbs my thoughts for an entire day, and sometimes I even start worrying the night before, so that I sleep badly. When it takes place, the dreaded encounter is utterly insignificant, justifying none of my anxiety, but the next time is no different: I never learn to learn.

‘My habits are of solitude, not of men.’ I don’t know if it was Rousseau or Senancour who said this. But it was some mind of my species, it being perhaps too much to say of my race.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“In order to understand, I destroyed myself.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“I am nothing.
I'll never be anything.
I couldn't want to be something.
Apart from that, I have in me all the dreams in the world.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“Ne türden olursa olsun, toplumsal zorunlulukları yerine getirmeyi düşününce, yalnızca düşününce, aklım allak bullak oluyor.”
― Pessoa Fernando, The Book of Disquiet

“But the horror that’s destroying me today is less noble and more corrosive. It’s a longing to be free of wanting to have thoughts, a desire to never have been anything, a conscious despair in every cell of my soul’s body. It’s the sudden feeling of being imprisoned in an infinite cell. Where can one think of fleeing, if the cell is everything?”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Absence, the highest form of presence.”
― James Joyce

“Good night. I'm Cinderella without her prince. Do you know where to find me in Tokyo? You won't see me again.”
― Osamu Dazai, Schoolgirl

“You are aware of only one unrest;
Oh, never learn to know the other!
Two souls, alas, are dwelling in my breast,
And one is striving to forsake its brother.
Unto the world in grossly loving zest,
With clinging tendrils, one adheres;
The other rises forcibly in quest
Of rarefied ancestral spheres.
If there be spirits in the air
That hold their sway between the earth and sky,
Descend out of the golden vapors there
And sweep me into iridescent life.
Oh, came a magic cloak into my hands
To carry me to distant lands,
I should not trade it for the choicest gown,
Nor for the cloak and garments of the crown.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, First Part

“Your brother is a sensitive person. Aesthetically, ethically, and intellectually he is in fact hypersensitive. As a result, it would seem that he was born only to torture himself. He has none of that saving dullness of intelligence which sees little difference between A and B. To him it must be either A or B. And if it is to be A, its shape, degree, and shade of color must precisely match his own conception of it; otherwise he will not accept it. Your brother, being sensitive, is all his life walking on a line he has chosen—a line as precarious as a tight rope. At the same time he impatiently demands that others also tread an equally precarious rope, without missing their footing. It would be a mistake, though, to think that this stems from selfishness. Imagine a world which could react exactly the way your brother expects; that world would undoubtedly be far more advanced than the world as it is now. Consequently, he detests the world which is—aesthetically, intellectually, and ethically—not as advanced as he is himself. That's why it's different from mere selfishness, I think.”
― Natsume Soseki, The Wayfarer

“Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“The world is for the person who is born to conquer it. And not for the one who dreams he can conquer it, even if he be right. I have dreamed more than Napoleon performed.”
― Fernando Pessoa, I Have More Souls Than One

“I want — unknown and calm.”
― Fernando Pessoa, I Have More Souls Than One

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Now, I myself am about to cut open my own heart, and drench your face with my blood. And I shall be satisfied if, when my heart stops beating, a new life lodges itself in your breast.”
― Sōseki Natsume, Kokoro

“I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.”
― Simone de Beauvoir

“You have to be very fond of men. Very, very fond. You have to be very fond of them to love them. Otherwise they're simply unbearable.”
― Marguerite Duras, Practicalities

“Very early in my life it was too late. It was already too late when I was eighteen. Between eighteen and twenty-five my face took off in a new direction. I grew old at eighteen. I don't know if it's the same for everyone, I've never asked. But I believe I've heard of the way time can suddenly accelerate on people when they're going through even the most youthful and highly esteemed stages of life. My ageing was very sudden. I saw it spread over my features one by one, changing the relationship between them, making the eyes larger, the expression sadder, the mouth more final, leaving great creases in the forehead. But instead of being dismayed I watched this process with the same sort of interest I might have taken in the reading of a book.”
― Marguerite Duras, The Lover

“God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of "parties" with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter - they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship - but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Yes, the heat lacerated the heart. And alone she resisted it, entire, virgin, the envy of the sea.”
― Marguerite Duras, Les petits chevaux de Tarquinia

“Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“I long for you; I who usually longs without longing, as though I am unconscious and absorbed in neutrality and apathy, really, utterly long for every bit of you.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“I remembered the moment I read a novel for the first time.

The texture of the soft paper touching my fingertips. The black letters blooming on a white field. The texture of the page I folded with my hands.

「 It isn’t important to read the letters. The important thing is where the letters lead you. 」

My mother, who loved books, used to say this. At least for me, it wasn’t just a saying.

The gaps in the black print. My own little snow garden lay in between the letters. This space, which was too small for someone to go into, was a perfect place for a child who liked to hide. Every time a pleasant sound was heard, the letters stacked up like snow.

In it, I became a hero. I had adventures, loved and dreamt. Thus, I read, read and read again.

I remembered the first time I was about to finish a book. It was like being deprived of the world.

The protagonist and supporting characters walked off with the sentence ‘They lived happily ever after’ and I was left alone at the end of the story. In my vanity and sense of betrayal, my young self struggled because I couldn’t stand the loneliness.

「This… is the end? 」

Perhaps it was similar to learning about death. For the first time, I realized that something was finite.”
― Singshong, 전지적 독자 시점 1 [Jeonjijeog Dogja Sijeom 1]

“Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?”
― Clarice Lispector, A Hora da Estrela

“For one has the right to shout.
So, I am shouting.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“Actually even the worst childhood is always enchanted, how awful.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“I am not an intellectual, I write with my body. And what I write is a moist fog.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star