André Prado

“With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two. I say two, because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point. Others will follow, others will outstrip me on the same lines; and I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“Há homens que da simples contradita do adversário concluem pela incompetência dele.”
― Machado de Assis, Obras Completas de Machado de Assis VI: Crônica

“É que as nódoas de sangue quando caem no chão não têm forma geométrica. As agonias da paixão, do desespero e do ciúme ardente quando coam num sangue tropical não se derretem em alexandrinos, não se modulam nas falas banais dessa poesia de convenção que se chama-conveniências dramáticas.”
― Álvares de Azevedo, Macário

“I catch myself carefully scrutinizing the loved body (like the narrator watching Albertine asleep). To scrutinize means to search: I am searching the other's body, as if I wanted to see what was inside it, as if the mechanical cause of my desire were in the adverse body (I am like those children who take a clock apart in order to find out what time is). This operation is conducted in a cold and astonished fashion; I am calm, attentive, as if I were confronted by a strange insect of which I am suddenly no longer afraid. Certain parts of the body are particularly appropriate to this observation: eyelashes, nails, roots of the hair, the incomplete objects. It is obvious that I am then in the process of fetishizing a corpse. As is proved by the fact that if the body I am scrutinizing happens to emerge from its inertia, if it begins doing something, my desire changes; if for instance I see the other thinking, my desire ceases to be perverse, it again becomes imaginary, I return to an Image, to a Whole: once again, I love.”
― Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments