a.

“Céu. A essência mineral do mundo. Pedra, fragmentos de pedra, acesa ou não, girando num vácuo obscuro. A sensação de dureza, de silêncio, desaba sobre a terra. O vago pulsar da vida resistirá? Feita de coisas exactas, astros nas suas órbitas, luz refractada, a solidão desprende-se dum mecanismo frio e só compreensível porque foi posto em andamento com o fim de a gerar. Desprende-se, desaba, matemática e exterior a nós, atinge-nos, tomamos consciência dela, vivemos talvez para que não passe sem ser contemplada. É isto o enigma de Cilinha.”
― Carlos de Oliveira, Pequenos Burgueses

“It seemed to her that he was ready to live and die for emotional errors as women did, but that like most men he did not call them emotional errors; he called them history, philosophy, metaphysics, science.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel

“I began to see very clearly that what destroyed me in this silent drama with my father was that I was always trying to tell something that never happened, or rather that everything that happened, the many incidents, the love of twenty years, the trip down south, all this produced a state like slumber and ether out of which I could only awake with great difficulty. It was a struggle with shadows, a story of not meeting the loved one but loving one’s self in the other, of never seeing the loved one but of seeing reflections of his presence everywhere, in everyone; of never addressing the loved one except through a diary or a book written about him, because in reality there was no connection between us, there was no human being to connect with. No one had ever merged into my father, yet we had thought a fusion could be realized through the likeness between us: but the likeness itself seemed to create greater separations and confusions. There was a likeness and no understanding, likeness and no nearness.”
― Anaïs Nin, Winter of Artifice

“Mark, at dinner, said he’d been re-reading “Anna Karenina”. Found it good, as novels go. But complained of the profound untruthfulness of even the best imaginative literature. And he began to catalogue its omissions. Almost total neglect of those small physiological events that decide whether day-to-day living shall have a pleasant or unpleasant tone. Excretion, for example, with its power to make or mar the day. Digestion. And, for the heroines of novel and drama, menstruation. Then the small illnesses—catarrh, rheumatism, headache, eyestrain. The chronic physical disabilities—ramifying out (as in the case of deformity or impotence) into luxuriant insanities. And conversely the sudden accessions, from unknown visceral and muscular sources, of more than ordinary health. No mention, next, of the part played by mere sensations in producing happiness. Hot bath, for example, taste of bacon, feel of fur, smell of freesias. In life, an empty cigarette-case may cause more distress than the absence of a lover; never in books. Almost equally complete omission of the small distractions that fill the greater part of human lives. Reading the papers; looking into shops; exchanging gossip; with all the varieties of day-dreaming, from lying in bed, imagining what one would do if one had the right lover, income, face, social position, to sitting at the picture palace passively accepting ready-made day-dreams from Hollywood.”
― Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza