The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd–The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (1982)
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (1982)
Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.
— Henry David Thoreau
— Henry David Thoreau