Jason

“I know that man is capable of great deeds. But if he isn't capable of great emotion, well, he leaves me cold.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“Being with her I feel a pain, like a frozen knife stuck in my chest. An awful pain, but the funny thing is I'm thankful for it. It's like that frozen pain and my very existence are one.
The pain is an anchor, mooring me here.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Since the pleasure we get from art is in a sense not our own, we don’t have to pay for it or regret it later. By art I mean everything that delights us without being ours – the trail left by what has passed, a smile given to someone else, a sunset, a poem, the objective universe. To possess is to lose. To feel without possessing is to preserve and keep, for it is to extract from things their essence.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Freedom is the possibility of isolation. You are free if you can withdraw from people, not having to seek them out for the sake of money, company, love, glory or curiosity, none of which can thrive in silence and solitude. If you can't live alone, you were born a slave. You may have all the splendours of the mind and the soul, in which case you're a noble slave, or an intelligent servant, but you're not free. And you can't hold this up as your own tragedy, for your birth is a tragedy of Fate alone. Hapless you are, however, if life itself so oppresses you that you're forced to become a slave. Hapless you are if, having been born free, with the capacity to be isolated and self-sufficient, poverty should force you to live with others.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet