I feel closer ties and more intimate bonds with certain characters in books, with certain images I’ve seen in engravings, than with many supposedly real people with the metaphysical absurdity known as ‘flesh and blood’. In fact, ‘flesh and blood’ describes them very well: they resemble cuts of meat laid out on the butcher’s marble slab, dead creatures bleeding as though still alive.
Interpretation
The quote reflects how fictional characters can evoke deeper emotional connections than some real people.
Fernando Pessoa expresses the idea that the connections we forge with fictional characters and artistic representations can often be more profound than those we have with real individuals in our lives. He critiques the superficiality of human relationships, likening them to mere physical beings devoid of true emotional substance, suggesting that our bonds with imaginative creations can offer richer experiences than those with 'flesh and blood' humans.
In practice
In a speech about the power of literature, one might reference this quote to illustrate the emotional depth found in storytelling.
I have at this moment so many fundamental thoughts, so many truly metaphysical things to say, that I suddenly get tired and decide not to write any more, not to think any more, but to allow the fever of speaking to make me sleepy, and with my eyes closed, like a cat, I play with everything I could have said.
It's been months since I last wrote. I've lived in a state of mental slumber, leading the life of someone else. I've felt, very often, a vicarious happiness. I haven't existed. I've been someone else. I've lived without thinking.
We all have two lives: The true, the one we dreamed of in childhood And go on dreaming of as adults in a substratum of mist; the false, the one we love when we live with others, the practical, the useful, the one we end up by being put in a coffin.
I'm a man for whom the outside world is an inner Reality.
My dreams are a stupid refuge, like an umbrella against a thunderbolt.
The chill of what I won't feel gnaws at my present heart.
How well I know what I mean to do When the long dark Autumn evenings come, And where, my soul, is thy pleasant hue? With the music of all thy voices, dumb In life’s November too! I shall be found by the fire, suppose, O’er a great wise book as beseemeth age, While the shutters flap as the cross-wind blows, And I turn the page, and I turn the page, Not verse now, only prose!
A man sooner or later discovers that he is the master-gardener of his soul, the director of his life.
Few things in this world are more predictable than the reaction of conventional minds to unconventional ideas.
I have always been of the mind that in a democracy manners are the only effective weapons against the bowie-knife.
I know that's the sort of thing people say and I really hate it when people say the sort of things people say. I always think, 'You don't mean that, you just think it sounds good.
If Christ has died for me, I cannot trifle with the evil that killed my best Friend.
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