“We know full well that the entire work has to be imperfect and that the least secure of our aesthetic contemplations will be the one we write about. But everything is imperfect: there is no sunset so beautiful that it couldn’t be more so, or light breeze that brings us sleep that couldn’t give us an even calmer sleep. And so, contemplators equally of mountains and statues, enjoying days as we enjoy books, dreaming everything, just to turn it into our intimate substance, we shall also make descriptions and analyses, which, once made, will become alien things, which we can enjoy, as if we had seen them in the afternoon.”

(Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, from note 153 in Alfred Mac Adam’s translation, which is note 176 in Maria Aliete Galhoz & Teresa Sobral Cunha’s edition of the Livro do Desassossego.)