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There are those who deny me the right to speak of God, because I am not a believer. And I say that I have every right in the world. I want to talk about God because it is a problem that affects all humanity. -- Jose Saramago
The sun appears in one of the upper corners of the rectangle, on the left of anyone looking at the picture. -- Jose Saramago
I don't defend the idea of universal love. It has never existed and will never exist. -- Jose Saramago
I don't quite grasp your meaning.
Just as I don't quite understand what I am saying. But back to the point ... . -- Jose Saramago
Penetrating the walls and rising to the stars, the music continued, the slow movement of the Eroica Symphony, crying out against pain, crying out against the injustice of man's mortality. -- Jose Saramago
Death is present every day in our lives. It's not that I take pleasure in the morbid fascination of it, but it is a fact of life. -- Jose Saramago
Yes, possibly, but I can guarantee you that if I were god, I would repeat every day Blessed are those who choose sedition because theirs is the kingdom of the earth, -- Jose Saramago
I'm not pessimistic. It is the world that is terrible. How can we be optimistic in the face of a planet where people live so badly, nature is being destroyed and the dominant empire is money? -- Jose Saramago
Just two tears. That's all life is worth. -- Jose Saramago
She's dead, said the doctor's wife, and her voice was expressionless, if it were possible for such a voice, as dead as the word it had spoken, to have come from a living mouth. -- Jose Saramago
Don't let the devil hear you, minister, The devil has such good hearing he doesn't need things to be spoken out loud, Well, god help us then, There's no point asking him for help either, he was born stone-deaf. -- Jose Saramago
God, the devil, good, evil, it's all in our heads, not in Heaven or Hell, which we also invented. We do not realize that, having invented God, we immediately became His slaves. -- Jose Saramago
Though I had come into the world on 16 November 1922, my official documents show that I was born two days later, on the 18th. It was thanks to this petty fraud that my family escaped from paying the fine for not having registered my birth at the proper legal time. -- Jose Saramago
The time for miracles has either passed or not come yet, besides, miracles, genuine miracles, whatever people say, are not such a good idea, if it means destroying the very order of things in order to improve them. -- Jose Saramago
Abstention means you stayed at home or went to the beach. By casting a blank vote, you're saying you have a political conscience but you don't agree with any of the existing parties. -- Jose Saramago
Slaves exist to serve us, perhaps we should open them up to see if they carry slaves inside, or open up a monarch to see if he has another monarch in his belly, I'll bet if we met the devil and he allowed us to open him up, we might be surprised to find God jumping out. -- Jose Saramago
Such insignificant differences as a few hundred years here or there were the motive for long, long controversies, both public and academic, which almost always resulted in the violent breakup of personal relationships and even in mortal enmities. -- Jose Saramago
How can you not know?" Silvestri said again. "Has twelve years of living the way you've been living not shown you how badly people live? The poverty, the hunger, the ignorance, the fear?" "Yes, but times have changed ... " "Yes, times have changed, but people haven't. -- Jose Saramago
God will save you.
Surely you're forgetting that God saves souls rather than bodies. -- Jose Saramago
We can escape from everything, but not from ourselves. -- Jose Saramago
[...] it seems you don't understand that words are the labels we stick on things, not the things themselves, you'll never know what the things are really like, nor even what their real names are, because the names you gave them are just that, the names you gave them [...] -- Jose Saramago
The day before is what we bring to the day we're actually living through, life is a matter of carrying along all those days-before just as someone might carry stones, and when we can no longer cope with the load, the work is done, the last day is the only one that is not the day before another day. -- Jose Saramago
In this case, consulting the dictionary would simply mean discovering what one already knew, Dictionaries only provide information that is likely to be useful to everyone -- Jose Saramago
Death isn't catching either, yet nevertheless we all die. -- Jose Saramago
The human being to lack that second skin we call egoism has not yet been born, it lasts much longer than the other one, that bleeds so readily. -- Jose Saramago
Who is that witch, asked the old man with the black eyepatch, these are things we say when we do not know how to take a good look at ourselves, had he lived as she had lived, we should like to see how long his civilised ways would last. -- Jose Saramago
The days are all the same, it's the hours that are different, when a day comes to an end it always does so with its twenty-four hours all present and correct, even when those hours contained nothing, but that's not the case with either your days or your hours -- Jose Saramago
All the great sadnesses, great temptations, and great mistakes are almost always the result of being alone in life, without a prudent friend to advise us when we are troubled by something more serious than our normal everyday problems. -- Jose Saramago
Every thing in life is a uniform; the only time our bodies are truly in civilian dress is when we're naked. -- Jose Saramago
We are so afraid of the idea of having to die ... that we always try to find excuses for the dead, as if we were asking beforehand to be excused when it is our turn ... -- Jose Saramago
There are things we do automatically, our body, acting on its own, avoids inconvenience whenever possible, that is why we sleep on the eve of battle or execution, and why ultimately we die when we can no longer bear the harsh light of existence. -- Jose Saramago
The angel muttered, Oh, no, a rationalist, -- Jose Saramago
Few things in life hurt as much as the awareness that one has betrayed the ideas of one's youth. -- Jose Saramago
None of them has a capital P branded on his forehead, -- Jose Saramago
Writer's make national literature, while translators make universal literature. -- Jose Saramago
Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are. -- Jose Saramago
To continue living, we have to die. That's the story of humanity - generation after generation - that we are going to die. There's nothing dramatic about death except that one loses one's life. -- Jose Saramago
Virtue, should there be anyone who still ignores the fact, always finds pitfalls on the extremely difficult path of perfection, but sin and vice are so favoured by fortune ... -- Jose Saramago
I believe myself to be the type of person who does not complicate his life. I have always lived my life without dramatizing things, whether the good things that have happened to me or the bad. I simply live those moments. -- Jose Saramago
Unlike Joseph her husband, Mary is neither upright nor pious, but she is not blame for this, the blame lies with the language she speaks if not with the men who invented it, because that language has no feminine form for the words upright and pious. -- Jose Saramago
They had their past to remember, the present to live in and the future to fear. -- Jose Saramago
We are only ever pretending to ourselves, never to other people ... -- Jose Saramago
This is the way fate usually treats us, it's right there behind us, it has already reached out a hand to touch us on the shoulder while we're still muttering to ourselves, It's all over, that's it, who cares anyhow. -- Jose Saramago
For human words are like shadows, and shadows are incapable of explaining light and between shadow and light there is the opaque body from which words are born.. -- Jose Saramago
What is your name, Blind people do not need a name, I am my voice, nothing else matters, But you wrote books and those books carry your name, said the doctor's wife, Now nobody can read them, it is as if they did not exist. -- Jose Saramago
Don't lose yourself, don't let yourself be lost, he said, and these were unexpected, enigmatic words that did not seem to fit the occasion. -- Jose Saramago
Three can eat as cheaply as two, the well-known arithmetic of resignation in any family where a child is expected, now one can say with even greater authority, Ten million can eat as cheaply as five, and with a quiet smile, A nation is nothing but a great big family. -- Jose Saramago
A tree weeps when cut down, a dog howls when beaten, but a man matures when offended. -- Jose Saramago
The minds of human beings are not always entirely at one with the world in which they live, some people have trouble adjusting to reality, basically they're just weak, confused spirits who use words, sometimes very skillfully, to justify their cowardice. -- Jose Saramago
We would understand much more about life's complexities if we applied ourselves to an assiduous study of its contradictions, instead of wasting time
on identities and coherences, seeing as these have a duty to provide their own explanations. -- Jose Saramago
Most common thing in marriage is to see the man or the woman, or both, each in their own way, trying to destroy the third person that they form together, the one that resists, that wants to survive regardless, -- Jose Saramago
Given the behaviour of human beings throughout the ages, they do not deserve life, with its many dark sides, in all its beauty, grandeur and magnificence ... -- Jose Saramago
This is the effect of panic, a natural effect, you could say that animal nature is like this, plant life would behave in exactly the same way, too, if it did not have all those roots to hold it in the ground, and how nice it would be to see the trees of the forest fleeing the flames. -- Jose Saramago
In the girl's room on the chest of drawers stood the glass vase with the withered flowers, the water had evaporated, it was there that her blind hands directed themselves, her fingers brushed against the dead petals, how fragile life is when it is abandoned. -- Jose Saramago
Time and time again one has seen how stories get exaggerated in the telling. -- Jose Saramago
Beginning with adolescence, my political formation was oriented in the ideological direction of Marxism. It was natural, being that my thinking was influenced by an atmosphere of active critical resistance. That was the way it was during all of the dictatorship and up to the Revolution of 1974. -- Jose Saramago
It was said that one of them, either the actor or the history teacher, was superfluous in this world, but you weren't, you weren't superfluous, there is no duplicate of you to come and replace you at your mother's side, you were unique, just as every ordinary person is unique, truly unique. -- Jose Saramago
It's odd how lightly people speak about the future, as if they held it in their hand, as if it was in their power to push it further off or bring it nearer in accordance with the needs and expediencies of the moment. -- Jose Saramago
how often fears come to sour our life and prove, in the end, to have no foundation, no reason to exist -- Jose Saramago
- You're very poetic.
- No, just sad. -- Jose Saramago
We are, more and more, our own defects and not our qualties.
The Elephant's Journey -- Jose Saramago
One cannot be too careful with words, they change their minds just as people do. -- Jose Saramago
The only miracle we can perform is to go on living, said the woman, to preserve the fragility of life from day to day, as if it were blind and did not know where to go, and perhaps it is like that, perhaps it really does not know, it placed itself in our hands, after giving us intelligence. -- Jose Saramago
Put less respectfully, these men and women, standing before the mirror of their life, spit every day in the face of what they were with the sputum of what they are. -- Jose Saramago
But he is now so accustomed to seeing that vertical strip of light when he opens his eyes in the morning that he has reached the absurd conclusion that without it he would be trapped forever in the shadows of sleep, in the darkness of his own body and the darkness of the world. -- Jose Saramago
We say Fine, even though we may be dying, and this is commonly known as taking one's courage in both hands, a phenomenon that has only been observed in the human species. -- Jose Saramago
There is relationship between sight and touch, something about eyes being able to see through the fingers touching the clay, about fingers being able to feel what the eyes are seeing without the fingers actually touching it. -- Jose Saramago
A letter is a most hazardous business, the written word allows no indecision, either distance or familiarity will emphasize the tone the letter establishes, and you end up with a relationship that is fiction -- Jose Saramago
I think we are all going to die, it's just a matter of time, Dying has always been a matter of time. -- Jose Saramago
The world is governed by institutions that are not democratic - the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO. -- Jose Saramago
Just as the habit does not make the monk, the sceptre does not make the king. -- Jose Saramago
God does not forgive the sins He makes us commit. -- Jose Saramago
I still have the strength to carry the bread I eat, What always weighs more is the bread of the others, -- Jose Saramago
but the effort of setting the table, heating up the food and then washing the dishes seemed to him tonight a superhuman one. -- Jose Saramago
In general, fakirs, like scribes and potters, are sitting down, when he's standing up, a fakir is just like an other man, and sitting down, he'll be smaller than the others -- Jose Saramago
The worst pain ... isn't the pain you feel at the time, it's the pain you feel later on when there's nothing you can do about it, They say that time heals all wounds, But we never live long enough to test that theory ... -- Jose Saramago
...the man who I still am loves the woman that you are -- Jose Saramago
The threat of rain appears to have nothing to do with Joao Elvas's desire to be alone, and one must not forget that, strange as it may seem, some men can spend their entire life alone and enjoy solitude, especially if it is raining and their crust is hard. -- Jose Saramago
Without the faintest possibility of finding a job, I decided to devote myself to literature: it was about time to find out what I was worth as a writer. -- Jose Saramago
We never consider that the things dogs know about us are things of which we have not the faintest notion. -- Jose Saramago
Hen he added, as if requiring a response to his own remark,
'Probably the greater the difference, the greater the similarity, and the greater the similarity, the greater the difference,' at that moment he did not yet know how right he was. -- Jose Saramago
The wise man contents himself with what he has, until such time as he invents something better. -- Jose Saramago
It just isn't possible for you to ask me all the questions, or for me to give you all the answers. -- Jose Saramago
You have to leave the island in order to see the island, that we can't see ourselves unless we become free of ourselves, Unless we escape from ourselves you mean, No, that's not the same thing. -- Jose Saramago
A man must earn his daily bread by some means some-where, and if his bread fails to nourish his soul, at least his body will be nourished while his soul suffers. -- Jose Saramago
I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always cliches, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it provides a more 'productive' literary raw material, but because that is the way we humans really are. -- Jose Saramago
Forgive me if what has seemed little to you, to me is all. -- Jose Saramago
The difficult thing isn't living with other people, it's understanding them. -- Jose Saramago
When I get to the end of what I'm saying, I have to believe in my having said it, that's often all that's needed just as water, flour, and yeast make bread. -- Jose Saramago
Death has no need to be cruel, taking people's lives is more than enough. -- Jose Saramago
No, there are three people in a marriage, there's the woman, there's the man, and there's what I call the third person, the most important, the person who is composed of the man and woman together. -- Jose Saramago
Blessed be the night, which conceals and protects things fair and foul with the same indifferent mantle. -- Jose Saramago
Only the donkey knows how weary it feels, all God cares about are humans, and not all humans, because some of them live like donkeys or worse, and God makes no effort to help them. -- Jose Saramago
A journey never ends. Only the travellers end. -- Jose Saramago
Images don't see, You're wrong, images see with the eyes of those who see them, -- Jose Saramago
Having is not the same as owning. You can have even those things you don't want. Owning means having and enjoying the things you have. He had a home, a wife and a son, but none of them was truly his. He only had himself, but even then not entirely. -- Jose Saramago
Death ... doesn't take her eyes off us for a minute, so much so that even those who are not yet due to die feel her gaze pursuing them constantly. -- Jose Saramago
[ ... ] with the protecting sky in all its splendour and the golden sun blazing forth against a backdrop of crystalline blue, to use the inspired words of a television reporter[ ... ]. -- Jose Saramago
I can't imagine myself outside any kind of social or political involvement. Yes, I'm a writer, but I live in this world, and my writing doesn't exist on a separate level. And if people know who I am and read my books, well, good; that way, if I have something more to say, then everyone benefits. -- Jose Saramago
I am the same person I was before receiving the Nobel Prize. I work with the same regularity, I have not modified my habits, I have the same friends. -- Jose Saramago
No human being can achieve all he or she desires in this life except in dreams, so good night all. -- Jose Saramago
Time is a master of ceremonies who always ends up putting us in our rightful place, we advance, stop, and retreat according to his orders, our mistake lies in imagining that we can catch him out. -- Jose Saramago
Perfect moments, especially when they verge on the sublime have the grave disadvantage of being very short lived, which in fact, being obvious, we would not need to mention were it not that they have a still greater disadvantage, which is that we do not know what to do once they are over. -- Jose Saramago
Hard experience of life has shown us that, generally speaking, it is inadvisable to trust too much in human nature. -- Jose Saramago
You do not know, you cannot know, what it means to have eyes in a world in which everyone else is blind, I am not a queen, no, I am simply the one who was born to see this horror, you can feel it, I both feel and see it. -- Jose Saramago
Life laughs at predictions and introduces words where we imagined silences, and sudden returns when we thought we would never see each other again. -- Jose Saramago
A human being is a being who is constantly 'under construction,' but also, in a parallel fashion, always in a state of constant destruction. -- Jose Saramago
It takes little or nothing to undo reputations, the merest trifle makes and remakes them, it is simply a question of finding the best means of engaging the confidence or interest of those who are to become one's unsuspecting echoes or accomplices. -- Jose Saramago
Repetitions almost always disappoint, the shine goes off them, they noticeably lack spontaneity, and if spontaneity is lacking, so is everything else. -- Jose Saramago
Oh, I'm not just going too far, I've arrived. -- Jose Saramago
We have deemed all these words necessary in order to explain that we have been traveling more slowly than was predicted, concision is not a definitive virtue, on occasion one loses out by talking too much, it is true, but how much has also been gained by saying more than was strictly necessary. -- Jose Saramago
Americans have discovered the fragility of life, that ominous fragility that the rest of the world either already experienced or is experiencing now with terrible intensity. -- Jose Saramago
The world had already changed before September 11. The world has been going through a process of change over the last 20 or 30 years. A civilization ends, another one begins. -- Jose Saramago
Now, on the contrary, here he was , plunged into a whiteness so luminous, so total, that it swallowed up rather than absorbed, not just colours, but the very things and beings , thus making them twice as invisible -- Jose Saramago
[ ... ] death never replies, not because she doesn't want to, but because she doesn't know what to say in the face of the greatest of human sorrows. -- Jose Saramago
There are certain words that draw back, that refuse to be uttered, because they are too laden with significance for our word-weary ears. -- Jose Saramago
The attitude of insolent haughtiness is characteristic of the relationships Americans form with what is alien to them, with others. -- Jose Saramago
The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers. -- Jose Saramago
I don't think it is worth explaining how a character's nose or chin looks. It is my feeling that readers will prefer to construct, little by little, their own character-the author will do well to entrust the reader with this part of the work. -- Jose Saramago
You never know beforehand what people are capable of, you have to wait, give it time, it's time that rules, time is our gambling partner on the other side of the table and it holds all the cards of the deck in its hand, we have to guess the winning cards of life, our lives. -- Jose Saramago
Prudence tried to hold him back, grip him by the sleeve, but, as everyone knows, or should know, prudence is only of any use when it is trying to conserve something in which we are no longer interested. -- Jose Saramago
Look what happened with the employment law in France-the law was withdrawn because the people marched in the streets. I think what we need is a global protest movement of people who won't give up. -- Jose Saramago
If I'm sincere today, what does it matter if I regret it tomorrow? -- Jose Saramago
And yet experience, unless applied to something, is just like that hoard of gold, for it neither produces nor bears fruit and is utterly useless. -- Jose Saramago
Buying that mask of Beethoven was an impossible dream. -- Jose Saramago
Here are times when it is best to be content with what one has, so as not to lose everything. -- Jose Saramago
I always ask two questions: How many countries have military bases in the United States? And in how many countries does the United States not have military bases? -- Jose Saramago
The blind inmates advanced like archangels surrounded by their own splendour. -- Jose Saramago
The inmates of the second ward in the right wing have decided, at long last, to bury their dead, at least we shall be rid of that particular stench, the smell of the living, however fetid, will be easier to get used to. -- Jose Saramago
Liking is probably the best form of ownership, and ownership the worst form of liking. -- Jose Saramago
It is not only the voice of blood that needs no eyes, love, which people say is blind, also has a voice of its own. -- Jose Saramago
The problem is that the right doesn't need any ideas to govern, but the left can't govern without ideas. -- Jose Saramago
People might ask me, What do you propose instead? I propose nothing. I am a mere novelist, I just write about the world as I see it. It is not my job to transform it. I cannot transform it all by myself, and I wouldn't even know how to. I limit myself to saying what I believe the world to be. -- Jose Saramago
The church I mentioned will be established, but its foundation, in order to be truly solid, will be dug in flesh, its walls made from the cement of renunciation, tears, agony, anguish, every conceivable form of death. -- Jose Saramago
If there is a way for the world to be transformed for the better, it can only be done by pessimism; optimists will never change the world for the better. -- Jose Saramago
We use words to understand each other and even, sometimes, to find each other. -- Jose Saramago
At the end of the 1950s, I started working at a publishing company, Estudios Cor, as production manager, so returning, but not as an author, to the world of letters I had left some years before. -- Jose Saramago
I had no books at home. I started to frequent a public library in Lisbon. It was there, with no help except curiosity and the will to learn, that my taste for reading developed and was refined. -- Jose Saramago
I presume that nobody will deny the positive aspects of the North American cultural world. These are well known to all. But these aspects do not make one forget the disastrous effects of the industrial and commercial process of 'cultural lamination' that the USA is perpetrating on the planet. -- Jose Saramago
I was a good pupil at primary school: in the second class I was writing with no spelling mistakes, and the third and fourth classes were done in a single year. -- Jose Saramago
Human beings are known universally as the only animals capable of lying, and while it is true that they sometimes lie out of fear and sometimes out of self-interest, they also occasionally lie because they realize, just in time, that this is the only means available to them of defending the truth. -- Jose Saramago
We can be only too grateful that an Archbishop of Braga should have immersed himself so deeply in theological speculation, armed and equipped as he was for war, with his coat of mail, his broadsword dangling from the -- Jose Saramago
These earthenware bowls are fragile and easily broken, they are only made of a little clay on which fortune has precariously bestowed a shape, and the same could be said of mankind. -- Jose Saramago
The angel told her, An honest man who committed a crime, you have no idea how many honest men have committed crimes, their crimes are countless, and contrary to popular belief these are the only crimes that cannot be forgiven. -- Jose Saramago
Ah, in every age there is always some new wonder to astound mankind until they grow accustomed to it and lose interest. -- Jose Saramago
We confidently say that it's not worth trying to reach any conclusions merely because we decide to stop halfway along the path that would lead us straight to them. -- Jose Saramago
As so often happens, the thing left undone tires you most of all, you only feel rested when it has been accomplished. -- Jose Saramago
...everything that is not literature is life. -- Jose Saramago
That we're going to die is something we know from the moment we are born, That's why, in some ways, it's as if we were born dead. -- Jose Saramago
I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist. -- Jose Saramago
The trouble with this dog is that it has grown too close to human beings, it will suffer as they do. -- Jose Saramago
We all know that each day that dawns is the first for some and will be the last for others, and that for most people it will be just another day. -- Jose Saramago
Whether we like it or not, the one justification for the existence of all religions is death, they need death as much as we need bread to eat. -- Jose Saramago
If we cannot live entirely like human beings, at least let us do everything in our power not to live entirely like animals, -- Jose Saramago
The only thing more terrifying than blindness is being the only one who can see. -- Jose Saramago
Finding these events set down in the history book did not change her mind in the least, all the textbook did was collect together the free-flowing fantasies of the person who had written it, and there was clearly little difference between those fantasies and the ones you could find in a novel. -- Jose Saramago
Do you mean that we have more words than we need, I mean that we have too few feelings, Or that we have them but have ceased to use the words they express, And so we lose them -- Jose Saramago
I think that after all it might be better to leave things as they are -- Jose Saramago
What the day brings is one thing, what we ourselves contribute to the day is quite another -- Jose Saramago
Casting a ballot is your irrevocable right, and no one will ever deny you that right, but just as you tell children not to play with matches, so we warn whole peoples of the dangers of playing with dynamite. -- Jose Saramago
It's ridiculous to throw away the present just because you're afraid there might not be a future, she said to herself, adding, Besides, not everything will necessarily happen tomorrow, some things will happen only the day after tomorrow -- Jose Saramago
We all have our moments of weakness, just as well that we are still capable of weeping, tears are often our salvation, there are times when we would die if we did not weep - Blindness -- Jose Saramago
Men are all the same, they think that because they came out of the belly of a woman they know all there is to know about women. -- Jose Saramago
Age carries with it a double load of guilt -- Jose Saramago
Men are angels born without wings, nothing could be nicer than to be born without wings and to make them grow. -- Jose Saramago
The devil doesn't make plans, anyway, if men were good, he wouldn't even exist. -- Jose Saramago
Creating is always so much more stimulating than destroying. -- Jose Saramago
But the hidden meaning of life is that life has no hidden meaning. Abel knew Pessoa's poetry well. -- Jose Saramago
The objectivity of the narrator is a modern invention, we need only reflect that our Lord God didn't want it in his book. -- Jose Saramago
We have been forced to watch, powerless, the rebels' brilliant tactic of helping our voters to move all their useless junk back into their apartments, that, gentlemen, could only be the brainchild of some machiavellian mastermind, -- Jose Saramago
I was born in a family of landless peasants, in Azinhaga, a small village in the province of Ribatejo, on the right bank of the Almonda River, around a hundred kilometres north-east of Lisbon. -- Jose Saramago
BESIDES THE CONVERSATION of women, it is dreams that keep the world in orbit. But dreams also form a diadem of moons, therefore the sky is that splendour inside a man's head, if his head is not, in fact, his own unique sky. -- Jose Saramago
Doesn't anybody understand that killing in the name of God only makes Him a murderer? -- Jose Saramago
Life is like that, full of words that are not worth saying or that were worth saying once but not any more, each word that we utter will take up the space of another more deserving word, not deserving in its own right, but because of the possible consequences of saying it. -- Jose Saramago
your God is the only warden of a prison where the only prisoner is your God. -- Jose Saramago
There is nothing as sad, nothing as unutterably sad, as an old man crying. -- Jose Saramago
If we are all to them is a pile of shit, then let's be a shit all the way, shoulder to shoulder, because they're bound to get splattered with some of the shit that we supposedly are -- Jose Saramago
I don't think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see. -- Jose Saramago
When we are born, when we enter this world, it is as if we signed a pact for the rest of our life, but a day may come when we will ask ourselves Who signed this on my behalf? -- Jose Saramago
The mustiness that permeated the apartment, its whole subterranean atmosphere, was redolent of an abandoned tomb. -- Jose Saramago
Society has to change, but the political powers we have at the moment are not enough to effect this change. The whole democratic system would have to be rethought. -- Jose Saramago
Am I really a mistake, he wondered, and supposing I am, what significance. what consequences does it have for a human being to know that he's a mistake. -- Jose Saramago
A stomach accustomed to hunger is satisfied with very little. -- Jose Saramago
Change it!" answered Silvestre, also springing to his feet. "How? By loving each other?" Abel's smile vanished when he saw Silvestre's grave expression. "Yes, but loving each other with a lucid, active love, a love that can overcome hatred. -- Jose Saramago
It's love," thought Abel, "it's love that gives them this calmness, this peace. And suddenly he was gripped by a violent desire to love, to give himself, to find the red flower of love growing in his arid life. -- Jose Saramago
Yet human experience and the practice of communication have shown throughout the ages that definitions are an illusion, like having a speech defect and trying to say love but unable to get the word out, or, better, having a tongue in one's head but unable to feel love. -- Jose Saramago
The order that wants the dead where they should be among the dead, and the living among the living -- Jose Saramago
Don't be afraid, the darkness you're in is no greater than the darkness inside your own body ... -- Jose Saramago
When I am occupied with a work that requires continuity - a novel, for example - I write every day. -- Jose Saramago
Because each of you has his or her own death, you carry it with you in a secret place from the moment you're born, it belongs to you and you belong to it. -- Jose Saramago
Earthenware is like people, it needs to be well treated. -- Jose Saramago
We live in a very peculiar world. Democracy isn't discussed, as if it was taken for granted, as if democracy had taken God's place, who is also not discussed. -- Jose Saramago
Sounds like another allegory, interrupted the unknown voice, if you want to be blind, then blind you will be. -- Jose Saramago
No one is just one person, you, for example, are both cain and abel, And you, Oh, I am all women, and all their names are mine, said lilith, -- Jose Saramago
Everything goes back to its beginnings, everything returns to chaos. Now, -- Jose Saramago
The virtue of maps, they show what can be done with limited space, they foresee that everything can happen therein. -- Jose Saramago
In the end, I am quite normal. I don't have odd habits. I don't dramatize. Above all, I do not romanticize the act of writing. I don't talk about the anguish I suffer in creating. I do not have a fear of the blank page, writer's block, all those things that we hear about writers. -- Jose Saramago
It is an unwavering rule for those in power that, when it comes to heads, it is best to cut them off before they start thinking, afterwards, it might be too late. -- Jose Saramago
The best way of killing a rose is to force it open when it is still only the promise of a bud. -- Jose Saramago
It's the difference between a categorical "Get up" and a tentative "What about trying to get up?". -- Jose Saramago
The U.S. needs to control the Middle East, the gateway to Asia. It already has military installations in Uzbekistan. -- Jose Saramago
When I think about it, I have no idea who you are, but that's not important, what matters is that we care about each other. -- Jose Saramago
Today's bread does not eliminate yesterday's hunger, much less that of tomorrow. -- Jose Saramago
That is what we say when we do not wish to play the weakling, we say Fine, even though we may be dying, and this is commonly known as taking one's courage in both hands -- Jose Saramago
The road to self-deception is narrow to begin with, but there's always someone ready to broaden it out, for as the proverb says, self-deception is like eating or scratching, it's all a matter of beginning. -- Jose Saramago
Lovers of concision, laconicism and economy of language will doubtless be asking, if the idea is such a simple one, why did we need all this waffle to arrive, at last, at the critical point. -- Jose Saramago
As citizens, we all have an obligation to intervene and become involved - it's the citizen who changes things. -- Jose Saramago
We're not short of movements proclaiming that a different world is possible, but unless we can coordinate them into an international movement, capitalism just laughs at all these little organisations. -- Jose Saramago
Dignity has no price, when someone starts making small concessions, in the end, life loses all meaning. -- Jose Saramago
There must be a government, said the first blind man, I'm not so sure, but there is, it will be a government of the blind trying to rule the blind, that is to say, nothingness trying to organize nothingness. -- Jose Saramago
Consciences keep silence more often than they should, that's why laws were created. -- Jose Saramago
There are such moments in life, when, in order for heaven to open, it is necessary for a door to close. -- Jose Saramago
We know that happiness is short-lived, that we fail to cherish it when it is within our grasp and value it only when it has vanished forever. -- Jose Saramago
The amber light came on. -- Jose Saramago
[ ... ]certainly not one of them would have known what to reply if they had been asked, Why are you holding hands as you go, it simply came about, there are gestures for which we cannot always find an easy explanation, sometimes not even a difficult one can be found. -- Jose Saramago
That it's possible not to see a lie even when it's in front of us. -- Jose Saramago
Anyone who gets up early by inclination or has been forced to rise early out of necessity finds it intolerable that others should go on sleeping soundly -- Jose Saramago
The much-quoted immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary occurred but once so that the world might know that Almighty God, when He so chooses, has no need of men, though He cannot dispense with women. -- Jose Saramago
You love me because you see me every day. You don't love me for who I am, you love me because of what I do or don't do. You don't know who I am. -- Jose Saramago
Everyone wants to save Man, but no one wants to know about men. -- Jose Saramago
I don't doubt that a man can live perfectly well on his own, but I'm convinced that he begins to die as soon as he closes the door of his house behind him. -- Jose Saramago
In matters of feeling and of the heart, too much is always better than too little. -- Jose Saramago
The fairest and most radically human, coming here to declare that, ultimately, God does not deserve to see. -- Jose Saramago
Can you imagine what Bush would say if someone like Hugo Chavez asked him for a little piece of land to install a military base, and he only wanted to plant a Venezuelan flag there? -- Jose Saramago
Sometimes I say that writing a novel is the same as constructing a chair: a person must be able to sit in it, to be balanced on it. If I can produce a great chair, even better. But above all I have to make sure that it has four stable feet. -- Jose Saramago
Let's all keep quiet, there are times when words serve no purpose, if only I, too, could weep, say everything with tears, not have to speak in order to be understood. -- Jose Saramago
It is well known that the human mind very often makes decisions for reasons it clearly does not know, presumably because it does so after having travelled the paths of the mind at such speed that, afterwards, it cannot recognise those paths, let alone find them again. -- Jose Saramago
I know nothing about God, except that His pleasure is as terrifying as His displeasure. -- Jose Saramago
Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be what they truly are. -- Jose Saramago
The wisest man I ever knew in my whole life could not read or write. -- Jose Saramago
This is neither the time nor the place, however, to ponder how often the soul, in order to be able to boast of a clean body, has burdened itself with sadness, envy, and impurity. -- Jose Saramago
Stretching one arm behind him, the man passed his hand over the horse's coat, his own skin transformed, or skin which had transformed into him. ("The Centaur") -- Jose Saramago
Human nature is, by definition, a talkative one, imprudent, indiscreet, gossipy, incapable of closing its mouth and keeping it closed. -- Jose Saramago
Switch on the light, she said, I want to know if this is real. -- Jose Saramago
I have yet to hear a single idea that was worth considering for longer than it took us to listen to it. -- Jose Saramago
A writer is just like anyone else, he cannot know everything, nor can he experience everything, he must ask and imagine, -- Jose Saramago
I am not a prophet. -- Jose Saramago
Each day is a little bit of history -- Jose Saramago
From Spain expect only cold winds and cold wives.'" "Ah, so you don't think they get on, then? -- Jose Saramago
I thought that in order to have got to where we are someone else must have been blind. -- Jose Saramago
Whether in peace or in war, man generally speaking is the best thing that ever happened to the gods. -- Jose Saramago
Being fired was the best luck of my life. It made me stop and reflect. It was the birth of my life as a writer. -- Jose Saramago
It is an unvarying rule for those in power that, when it comes to heads, it is best to cut them off before they start to think, afterward, it might be too late. -- Jose Saramago
Doubt is the privilege of those who have lived a long time, -- Jose Saramago
Each part in itself constitutes the whole to which it belongs. -- Jose Saramago
I am a four-dimensional ghost, he murmured to himself. -- Jose Saramago
Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered -- Jose Saramago
The instant is gone, time has carried us into the realm of memory, it was like this, no, it was not, and everything becomes what we choose to invent. -- Jose Saramago
When you are old and realize that time is running out, you start imagining that you have the cure for all the ills of the world in your hand, and get frustrated because no one pays you any attention. -- Jose Saramago
Don't you know, If you don't step outside yourself, you'll never discover who you are -- Jose Saramago
The will of God, the creator and ruler of the universe, embraces all possible wills, His own as well as that of every man born into this world. If this is so, intervened Jesus with sudden insight, then each man is a part of God. -- Jose Saramago
There is nothing healthier for a man than to walk on his own two legs -- Jose Saramago
A writer is a man like any other: he dreams. And my dream was to be able to say of this book, when I finished: 'This is a book about Alentejo'. -- Jose Saramago
Understanding, perhaps, but understanding is just a word. No one can understand another person unless he is that other person. -- Jose Saramago
From literature to ecology, from the escape velocity of galaxies to the greenhouse effect, from garbage disposal methods to traffic jams, everything is discussed in our world. But the democratic system, as if it were a given fact, untouchable by nature until the end of time, we don't discuss that. -- Jose Saramago
Oh, I doubt that, we gods are like bottomless wells, if you lean over us, you won't even see your image reflected back -- Jose Saramago
I am traveling less in order to be able to write more. I select my travel destinations according to their degree of usefulness to my work. -- Jose Saramago
In the end we discover the only condition for living is to die. -- Jose Saramago
That is the dream of all novelists-that one of their characters will become 'somebody.' -- Jose Saramago
I think the novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers. The novel receives streams of science, philosophy, poetry and contains all of these; it's not simply telling a story. -- Jose Saramago
Nothing so tires a person as having to struggle, not with himself, but with an abstraction. -- Jose Saramago
Such is our need to shower blame on some distant entity when it is we who lack the courage to face up to what is there before us. -- Jose Saramago
Pommel of his saddle and his helmet with a nose-piece, arms which might well prevent him from reaching any conclusions based on humanitarian logic, -- Jose Saramago
One could argue that those who have abandoned their homes do not deserve to live there and enjoy them -- Jose Saramago
Because, sir, in case you don't know it, words move, they change from one day to the next, they are as unstable as shadows, are themselves shadows, which both are and have ceased to be, soap bubbles, shells in which one can barely hear a whisper, mere tree stumps. -- Jose Saramago
Americans have discovered fear. -- Jose Saramago
Even death, faced with the option of death or life, she would choose life. -- Jose Saramago
The church has never been asked to explain anything, our speciality, along with ballistics, has always been the neutralisation of the overly curious mind through faith. -- Jose Saramago
Blindness is also this, to live in a world where all hope is gone. -- Jose Saramago
In a king, modesty would be a sign of weakness. -- Jose Saramago
Chaos is order yet undeciphered. -- Jose Saramago
What torments people have to go through when they leave the safety of their homes to become embroiled in mad adventures. -- Jose Saramago
The period that I could consider the most important in my literary work came about beginning with the Revolution, and in a certain way, developed as a consequence of the Revolution. But it was also a result of the counterrevolutionary coup of November 1975. -- Jose Saramago
There are plenty of reasons not to put up with the world as it is. -- Jose Saramago
If I could repeat my childhood, I would repeat it exactly as it was, with the poverty, the cold, little food, with the flies and pigs, all that. -- Jose Saramago
No, I've never been to Galicia, Galicia is the land of others -- Jose Saramago
Our god, the creator of heaven and earth, is completely mad -- Jose Saramago
A man was on his way to the gallows when he met another, who asked him: where are you going, my friend? and the condemned man replied: i'm not going anywhere. they're taking me by force. -- Jose Saramago
Just like everything else in life, let time take its course and it will find a solution. -- Jose Saramago
Having fun is a remedy only for those who don't need one, -- Jose Saramago
I do not just write, I write what I am. If there is a secret, perhaps that is it. -- Jose Saramago
There were men and women who appeared as fluid as ghosts, they could have been attending a burial out of curiosity, merely to recall how it had been when they were buried. -- Jose Saramago
It is economic power that determines political power, and governments become the political functionaries of economic power. -- Jose Saramago
We know that it is the search that gives meaning to any find and that one often has to travel a long way in order to arrive at what is near. -- Jose Saramago
We no longer live in that fabulous age when the sun, to whom we owe so much, was so generous that it halted its journey over Gibeon in order to give Joshua ample time to overcome the five kings besieging the city. -- Jose Saramago
Strictly speaking, we do not make decisions, decisions make us. -- Jose Saramago
Words that come from the heart are never spoken, they get caught in the throat and can only be read in ones's eyes. -- Jose Saramago
he called out to the open sky, where God could be seen smiling, Men, forgive Him, for He knows not what He has done. -- Jose Saramago
That's how life should be, when one person loses heart, the other must have heart and courage enough for both. -- Jose Saramago
Words have their own hierarchy, their own protocol, their own artistic titles, their own plebeian stigmas. -- Jose Saramago
The final notes of the funeral march dropped like violets onto the tomb of the hero -- Jose Saramago
Authoritarian, paralyzing, circular, occasionally elliptical stock phrases, also jocularly referred to as nuggets of wisdom, are a malignant plague, one of the very worst ever to ravage the earth. -- Jose Saramago
It is an archive ... You probably get rooms like this in even the most modern of offices, like a rusty anchor chained to the past and with no purpose in life. -- Jose Saramago
Everything in this world can volunteer some reply, what takes up time is posing the questions. -- Jose Saramago
Every novel is like this, desperation, a frustrated attempt to save something of the past. Except that it still has not been established whether it is the novel that prevents man from forgetting himself or the impossibility of forgetfulness that makes him write novels. -- Jose Saramago
his career had just taken a great leap forward, he was going to pee in his chief's toilet. -- Jose Saramago
People live with the illusion that we have a democratic system, but it's only the outward form of one. In reality we live in a plutocracy, a government of the rich. -- Jose Saramago
we shall no longer know who we are, or even remember our names -- Jose Saramago
It is true what people say, the young have the ability, but lack the wisdom, and the old have the wisdom, but lack the ability. -- Jose Saramago
The ear has to be educated if one wishes to appreciate musical sounds, just as the eyes must learn to distinguish the value of words. -- Jose Saramago
Words were not given to man in order to conceal his thoughts -- Jose Saramago
Unless Caesar Augustus is unwittingly complying with the will of God, if it is true that in His divine wisdom He has ordained that Joseph and Mary should go to Bethlehem at this time. -- Jose Saramago
They're coming, they're coming. -- Jose Saramago
I believe that I've been asked all possible questions. I, myself, if I were a journalist, would not know what to ask me. -- Jose Saramago
The habit of falling hardens the body, reaching the ground, to in itself, is a relief. -- Jose Saramago
Blind people do not need a name, I am my voice, nothing else matters. -- Jose Saramago
No one has an obligation to love anyone else, but we are all under an obligation to respect each other. According to this logic, Saramago considered -- Jose Saramago
Beethoven was ugly too, and no woman ever loved him, and he was Beethoven! He didn't need to be loved in order to do what he did. He just needed to love and he did. -- Jose Saramago
Sleep is a skilled magician, it changes the proportions of things, the distances between them, it separates people and they're lying next to each other, brings them together and they can barely see one another ... -- Jose Saramago
The pigs, either because of the shock of it or because they hated being possessed by demons, went wild and threw themselves over the cliff, all two thousand of them, and into the lake, where they drowned. -- Jose Saramago
There is nothing in this world that belongs to us in an absolute sense, -- Jose Saramago
A man could spend his whole life wandering about here and never find himself, especially if he is born lost. -- Jose Saramago
As my cat would say, all hours are good for sleeping. -- Jose Saramago
I write to try to understand, and because I have nothing better to do. -- Jose Saramago
... that destiny has to make many turnings before arriving anywhere, destiny alone knows what it has cost ... -- Jose Saramago
Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be, of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt. -- Jose Saramago
Things will be very bad for Latin America. You only have to consider the ambitions and the doctrines of the empire, which regards this region as its backyard. -- Jose Saramago
But truths need to be repeated many times so that they don't, poor things, lapse into oblivion. -- Jose Saramago
You have no idea what it is like to watch two blind people fighting. Fighting has always been, more or less, a form of blindness. -- Jose Saramago
We are marching against the law of the jungle that the United States and its acolytes old and new want to impose on the world ... -- Jose Saramago
All fate's reasons are human. -- Jose Saramago
The past is an immense area of stony ground that many people would like to drive across as if it were a motorway, while others move patiently from stone to stone, lifting each one because they need to know what lies beneath. -- Jose Saramago
The hidden meaning of life . . . But the hidden meaning of life is that life has no hidden meaning. -- Jose Saramago
And now we shall also die of blindness, I mean, we shall die of blindness and cancer, of blindness and tuberculosis, of blindness and AIDS, of blindness and heart attacks, illnesses may differ from one person to another but what is really killing us now is blindness -- Jose Saramago
He went plof and vanished. Onomatopoeia can be so very handy. Imagine if we'd had to provide a detailed description of someone disappearing. It would have taken us at least ten pages. Plof. -- Jose Saramago
All these words to say the same sad thing. That's what these people are like, they're never quite sure what they mean. -- Jose Saramago
To threaten someone with a gun is the same as attacking them, If you had taken his gun, the real war would have started, and in all likelihood we would never have got out of that place alive, -- Jose Saramago
Will we ever learn that certain things can be understood only if we take the trouble to trace them to their origins. -- Jose Saramago
In order to invent heaven and hell a man would need to know nothing except the human body -- Jose Saramago
what is right and what is wrong are simply different ways of understanding our relationships with the others, not that which we have with ourselves -- Jose Saramago
Globalization is a form of totalitarianism ... It is the rich who rule, and the poor live as they can. -- Jose Saramago
When all is said and done, what is clear is that all lives end before their time. -- Jose Saramago
Each man knows himself, but only God knows all men -- Jose Saramago
The flip-flap of Carmen's slippers could be heard out in the corridor, an aggressive sound, more eloquent than any words. -- Jose Saramago
But appearances, while not always as deceptive as people say. -- Jose Saramago
Your questions are false if you already know the answer. -- Jose Saramago
the thing separating them was only a door and not a wall. He said nothing, merely nodded and thought to himself that worse than any wall is a door to which one has never had the key, a key he didn't know where to find, or even if it existed. -- Jose Saramago
Lord knows why they depict death with wings when death is everywhere. -- Jose Saramago
That night the blind man dreamt that he was blind. -- Jose Saramago
the human body is also an organised system, it lives as long as it keeps organised, and death is only the effect of disorganisation, And how can a society of blind people organise itself in order to survive, By organising itself, to organise oneself is, in a way, to begin to have eyes -- Jose Saramago
What kind of world is this that can send machines to Mars and does nothing to stop the killing of a human being? -- Jose Saramago
A writer's definitive death is when no one reads his books anymore. That's the final death. -- Jose Saramago
It is difficult to understand these people who democratically take part in elections and a referendum, but are then incapable of democratically accepting the will of the people. -- Jose Saramago
All stories are like those about the creation of the universe, no one was there, no one witnessed anything, yet everyone knows what happened. -- Jose Saramago
This must be what it means to be a ghost, being certain that life exists, because your four senses say so, and yet unable to see it. -- Jose Saramago
the only thing that lasts a whole lifetime is life itself, everything else is inevitably precarious, unstable, transient -- Jose Saramago
Fear can cause blindness, said the girl with dark glasses, Never a truer word, that could not be truer, -- Jose Saramago
Fear can cause blindness ... we were already blind the moment we turned blind, fear struck us blind, fear will keep us blind -- Jose Saramago
no one could ever put a splint on a frog's leg -- Jose Saramago
Fortunately, as human history has shown, it is not unusual for good to come of evil, less is said about the evil that can come out of good -- Jose Saramago
in order to win a battle it might sometimes be necessary to lose it -- Jose Saramago
Everyone has to speak of what they know, and what they do not know they should ask, -- Jose Saramago
I am a person with leftist convictions, and always have been. -- Jose Saramago
You know the name you were given, you do not know the name that you have -- Jose Saramago
Death is the inventor of God. -- Jose Saramago
One can show no greater respect than to weep for a stranger. -- Jose Saramago
With the passage of time, as well as the social evolution and genetic exchange, we ended up putting our conscience in the color of our blood and the salt of our tears. -- Jose Saramago
Reading is probably another way of being in a place. -- Jose Saramago
Everything that will happen will happen ... and if you don't get to see it.. It will be because we didn't live long enough -- Jose Saramago
That's how life is, what it gives with one hand one day, it takes away with the other. -- Jose Saramago
In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn't know how to write essays. -- Jose Saramago
Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is. -- Jose Saramago
There is nothing that is truly free nor democratic enough. Make no mistake, the internet did not come to save the world. -- Jose Saramago
The republic was no longer a novelty, and here people only appreciate novelties. -- Jose Saramago
Without a future, the present serves no purpose, -- Jose Saramago
Blindness is a private matter between a person and the eyes with which he or she was born. -- Jose Saramago
Keep what is of no use at the moment, and later you will find what you need. -- Jose Saramago
News is nothing but words, and you can never really tell if words are news. -- Jose Saramago
On those grim days when he felt surrounded by the vacuum of absurdity, he always felt particularly weary. He tried to blame his weariness on the daily -- Jose Saramago
The only time we can talk about death is while we're alive, not afterwards. -- Jose Saramago
Are dreams perhaps the soul's memories of the body, -- Jose Saramago
you know what they say, don't wash your basket out, until the last grape's in -- Jose Saramago
If you don't write your books, nobody else will do it for you. No one else has lived your life. -- Jose Saramago