Lúcio Cardoso > Quotes

“Truth cannot be invented, it cannot be distorted or replaced--it is simply that, the truth. However grotesque, absurd, or fatal, it is the truth.”
― Lúcio Cardoso

“I went over to the bed and knelt down beside it. I saw that she was still breathing, not in the hoarse, distressing way she had been breathing over the last few days, but almost serenely, as if the sacrament really had brought her relief. Then I took her pulse and felt it beating, rather irregularly, but beating nonetheless, and that was enough to assure me that she was still there. Finally, I carefully tried to prize open her eyelids, so that she could, if possible, see me, or so that I could at least see her, even if she could not see me. If my image could no longer penetrate the place where she now found herself, and I was, for her, merely a dull, meaningless thing, I wanted at least to be able to see my own image in those opaque pupils and feel myself floating on the surface of that world that had once been mine and which, now that it was lost, would bear me up as indifferently as a wave washing over a dead body. And I was thinking this even as I was trying to open her eyelids, which insisted on closing, while, meanwhile, everything inside me rebelled against being made an outcast, an exile, and I wanted her to see me, for my presence once more to illumine her inner world, which was, at that moment, heading into endless night, the desert where she would know nothing about me.”
― Lúcio Cardoso, Crônica da Casa Assassinada

“Resta-nos, como essas ervas desesperadas que se agarram às paredes em ruínas, a nostalgia do que poderia ter sido. Não, Nina, não pense que a estou acusando, que ainda a culpo como de um crime, por tudo o que aconteceu. Há muito que desapareceu este meu rigor de antigamente.
acredito hoje que somos culpados em comum por tudo o que não soubemos levar avante - e se construímos a culpa, também fomos as vítimas.”
― Lúcio Cardoso, Crônica da Casa Assassinada