“Ah, it's my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me!”

Source: The Book of Disquiet

Last update Sept. 29, 2023. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Ah, it's my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me!" by Fernando Pessoa?
Fernando Pessoa photo
Fernando Pessoa 288
Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publi… 1888–1935

Related quotes

José Saramago photo

“Ah, who will write the history of what might have been?”

José Saramago (1922–2010) Portuguese writer and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature

Fernando Pessoa (as Álvaro de Campos), quoted by José Saramago in The Stone Raft (1986), p. 9
Misattributed

Norman Spinrad photo

“When he saw me look her over, he hinted that she might be willing to, ah, stay behind and work out details of the contract with me personally, no matter how long it might take.”

Steve Perry (1947) American writer

Jo nodded. No surprise there. Sex had sold stuff ever since stuff had been around.
Source: The Vastalimi Gambit (2013), Chapter 3

Leonard Cohen photo

“Ah, you loved me as a loser, but now you're worried that I just might win”

Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) Canadian poet and singer-songwriter

"First We Take Manhattan" (1986)
I'm Your Man (1988)
Context: Ah, you loved me as a loser, but now you're worried that I just might win
You know the way to stop me, but you don't have the discipline
How many nights I prayed for this, to let my work begin
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.

Gustave Nadaud photo

“Yet could I these two days have spent,
While still the autumn sweetly shone,
Ah, me! I might have died content
When I had looked on Carcassonne.”

Gustave Nadaud (1820–1893) songwriter

Stanza 2.
Carcassonne, (c. 1887; with translation by John Reuben Thompson)

Torquato Tasso photo

“My torments easy, full of sweet delight,
If this I could obtain,—that breast to breast
Thy bosom might receive my yielded sprite.”

Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) Italian poet

O fortunati miei dolci martiri!
S'impetrerò che giunto seno a seno,
L'anima mia nella tua bocca io spiri.
Canto II, stanza 35 (tr. Fairfax)
Gerusalemme Liberata (1581)

Algernon Charles Swinburne photo
Rod McKuen photo

“These long years later it is worse
for I remember what it was
as well as what it might have been.”

Rod McKuen (1933–2015) American poet, songwriter, composer, and singer

Source: Listen to the Warm

Luís de Camões photo
George Granville, 1st Baron Lansdowne photo

“Mankind, from Adam, have been women's fools;
Women, from Eve, have been the devil's tools:
Heaven might have spar'd one torment when we fell;
Not left us women, or not threatened hell.”

George Granville, 1st Baron Lansdowne (1666–1735) 1st Baron Lansdowne

She-Gallants; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), "Women", p. 886-97.

Related topics