Who Am I · the question underneath
Quotes about finding yourself
For when you don’t recognise your own life.
One verified literary line a day. A private place to write what it brings up.
Who am I? is the oldest question there is. Mystics, rebels and diarists asked it for centuries, and their answers are stranger and more honest than any self-help book.
“I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.”
This is one line. The rest of the Who Am I thread is inside Saudade — one line a day, chosen by a person, with a private page to write what it brings up. Over the weeks, your pages become a book of your own.
Read tomorrow’s lineWriters in this thread
- Omar Khayyám on wine
- Walt Whitman on the self and freedom
- Zitkála-Šá on freedom and the self
- Ludwig van Beethoven on contradiction and life
- Henry David Thoreau on freedom and the self
- Frederick Douglass on freedom and the self
- Leo Tolstoy on the self
- Jack London on life and wine
- Michel de Montaigne on contradiction and the self
- Emily Brontë on freedom
- W. E. B. Du Bois on the self
- Virginia Woolf on freedom and the self
- Wu-ti on wine
- Confucius on the self
- José Santos Chocano on freedom
Their lines arrive one a day, inside the app.
For readers, writers and artists
For readers, poetry lovers, and anyone who keeps a short private writing habit. Every day’s line can be a prompt: writers can use it to find a place to begin, poets a first line, painters and illustrators a mood. Nobody reads your page but you.
Try this
Write a letter to yourself five years ago, in words that person would believe.
Why these lines
Every line in Saudade is chosen by a person, quoted word for word from the original book, and carries its author, source and year. Nothing is generated, paraphrased or scraped. Never AI.
Most quote sites are full of lines nobody ever said. Ours you can look up.