I'm a huge fan of the work of Fernando Pessoa. 'The Book of Disquiet' is one of those books I can just dip into whenever I feel the urge and the words nearly always resonate with whatever's going on in my own head. Here's one such excerpt I pulled up earlier:
"I have never loved anybody. What I have loved the most are my feelings - states of conscious viscosity, impressions of a quick ear, smells which are a means, for the humility of the external world, to speak to me, to talk to me about the past (so easily recalled by smells), that is to provide me with more reality, more emotions than a mere loaf of bread cooking at the back of an old bakery, as on that distant afternoon when I was coming back from the burial of an uncle who loved me deeply, and when I felt the sweetness of a minor appeasement, from what I have no idea.
That is my morality, or my metaphysics, in other words, what I am: the ultimate Passer-by, of everything and even of my soul: I belong to nothing, desire nothing, am nothing - an abstract centre of impersonal feelings, a sensitive mirror fallen by chance and pointed towards the diversity of the world. After all that, I have no idea if I am happy or unhappy: it is of little or no importance to me.
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