xy

@xy, member from Sept. 25, 2023

Favourite quotes (21448)

“The young have the ability, but lack the wisdom, and the old have the wisdom, but lack the ability.”

José Saramago book The Cave

Nem a juventude sabe o que pode nem a velhice pode o que sabe.
Source: The Cave (2000), p. 4 (Vintage 2003)

“If you can see, look. If you can look, observe.”

José Saramago book Blindness

Se podes olhar, vê. Se podes ver, repara.
Epigraph
Blindness (1995)

“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”

José Saramago book The Cave

Source: The Cave (2000), p. 60 (Vintage 2003)

“The universe has no news of our existence.”

José Saramago (1922–2010) Portuguese writer and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature

O universo não tem notícia da nossa existência.
Interview with Adelino Gomes, Público, 13 November, 2005.

“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.”

José Saramago (1922–2010) Portuguese writer and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature

Interview with Edney Silvestre, 2007.

“What the eye doesn’t see the heart doesn’t grieve over.”

José Saramago book All the Names

Source: All the Names (1997), p. 185

“I believe that I've been asked all possible questions. I, myself, if I were a journalist, would not know what to ask me.”

José Saramago (1922–2010) Portuguese writer and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature

Interview with "O Globo", July 2009.

“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.”

José Saramago (1922–2010) Portuguese writer and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature

Quoted in José Saramago: il bagaglio dello scrittore‎, page 41, by Giulia Lanciani, published by Bulzoni, 1996 ISBN 8871199332, 9788871199337 (256 pages).

“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.”

José Saramago book The Cave

Page 61, 2002 (Harvest Hardcover edition)
The Cave (2000)

“The question suddenly came into my head, 'And if we were all blind?' And then immediately, as if answering myself, 'But we are all blind.”

José Saramago book Blindness

Um dia, sentado à mesa, pensei: E se fôssemos todos cegos? Imediatamente me veio a resposta: Nós somos todos cegos.
On the idea for his next novel (Blindness), which came to him while sitting in a restaurant; New York Times interview with Alan Riding (1998), as quoted in Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies, 6th Edition (Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture, 2001), p. 131.

“…I'm not able to fear death… We will all turn skeletons and everything shall end. The skeleton becomes, therefore, the most radical form of nudity.”

José Saramago (1922–2010) Portuguese writer and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature

ÉPOCA Interview (in Portuguese) http://revistaepoca.globo.com/Epoca/0,6993,EPT1061569-1666-1,00.html, São Paulo, 2005.

“Encyclopedias are like immutable cycloramas, prodigious projectors whose reels have got stuck and which show, with a kind of maniacal fixity, a landscape which, because it is condemned to be only and for all eternity what it was, will at the same time grow older more decrepit and more unnecessary. The encyclopedia purchased by Cipriano Algor's father is magnificent and as useless as a line of poetry we cannot quite remember.”

José Saramago book The Cave

Source: The Cave (2000), p. 57 (Vintage 2003)

“The distribution of tasks among the various employees follows a simple rule, which is that the duty of the members of each category is to do as much work as they possibly can, so that only a small part of that work need be passed to the category above. This means that the clerks are obliged to work without cease from morning to night, whereas the senior clerks do so only now and then, the deputies very rarely, and the Registrar almost never.”

José Saramago book All the Names

Source: All the Names (1997), p. 2

“Everything is discussed in this world, except for one thing: democracy. Democracy is not discussed. Democracy is there, as a kind of saint, from whom no miracles are expected, but that is there as a reference: "the democracy"; and we don’t notice that the democracy in which we live in is a kidnapped, conditioned and amputated one, because the power of the citizen, the power of each one of us, is limited, in the political sphere, I repeat, in the political sphere, to removing a government that we don’t like and replacing it by another one that we might come to like. Nothing else. But the important decisions are made in another sphere, and we all know which one it is. The great international financial organizations, the IMFs, the World Trade Organizations, the World Banks, the OECD, all of these… None of these institutions is democratic, so how can we continue to talk about democracy, if those who actually govern the world are not democratically elected by the people? Who chooses the countries' representatives in those institutions? Their respective peoples? No. So where is the democracy?”

José Saramago (1922–2010) Portuguese writer and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature

Conference http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aWFQRcdChk at Fórum Social Mundial, December 2007.