xy

@xy, member from Sept. 25, 2023

Favourite quotes (21448)

“We would know far more about life’s complexities if we applied ourselves to the close study of its contradictions instead of wasting so much time on similarities and connections, which should anyway, be self-explanatory.”

José Saramago book The Cave

Source: The Cave (2000), p. 15 (Vintage 2003)

“I was already at the twentieth section of the book and not very happy with it, when I realised how it could be written. I saw that I would only be able to write it if I did so as if I were actually telling the story. That could not be done by putting so-called oral language into writing, because that's impossible, but by introducing into my writing a mechanism of apparent spontaneity, apparent digression and apparent disorganisation in the discourse. I say 'apparent' since I am only too aware of how much work it took to ensure that it turned out like that.”

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

...eu já estava na vigésima parte do livro, triste, quando senti que o livro podia ser escrito. Percebi que só seria capaz de escrevê-lo se o fizesse como se contasse. Não passando para a escrita o chamado discurso oral, porque isso é impossível, mas introduzindo na escrita um me-canismo de aparente prolixidade, aparente desor-ganização do discurso. Digo aparente porque sei o trabalho que me deu fazer de conta que era tudo assim.
Interview in Idéias, no. 107 (15 October 1988), trans. Margaret Jull Costa.

“I write to try to understand, and because I have nothing better to do.”

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

"Efe" report, in Arrecife de Lanzarote (Spain), "Saramago diz que escreve por não ter 'nada melhor para fazer'", published in Folha de São Paulo http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/ilustrada/ult90u68178.shtml, 2007.

“If we cannot live entirely like human beings, at least let us do everything in our power not to live entirely like animals.”

José Saramago book Blindness

Se não formos capazes de viver inteiramente como pessoas, ao menos façamos tudo para não viver inteiramente como animais.
Source: Blindness (1995), p. 116

“We humans are, at bottom, carriers of the time, because we take it with us, we use it, sometimes we waste it and sometimes something remains, though everything is doomed to oblivion.”

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

"Efe" report, Folha de São Paulo http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/ilustrada/ult90u68178.shtml, 2007.

“Do you want me to tell you what I think, Yes, do, 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.”

José Saramago book Blindness

Source: Blindness (1995), p. 326

“You know the name you were given,
You do not know the name you have”

José Saramago book All the Names

"The book of certainties"
All the Names (1997)

“Destiny isn’t taken in by people trying to make what came first come afterwards.”

José Saramago book The Cave

Source: The Cave (2000), p. 12 (Vintage 2003)

“I was reading even before I could spell properly, even though I couldn't necessarily understand what I was reading. Being able to identify a word I knew was like finding a signpost on the road telling me I was on the right path, heading in the right direction. And so it was, in this rather unusual way, Diário by Diário, month by month, pretending not to hear the jokey comments made by the adults in the house, who were amused by the way I would stare at the newspaper as if at a wall, that my moment to astonish them finally came, when, one day, nervous but triumphant, I read out loud, in one go, without hesitation, several consecutive lines of print.”

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

Mal sabendo ainda soletrar, já lia, sem perceber que estava lendo. Identificar na escrita do jornal uma palavra que eu conhecesse era como encontrar um marco na estrada a dizer-me que ia bem, que seguia na boa direcção. E foi assim, desta maneira algo invulgar, Diário após Diário, mês após mês, fazendo de conta que não ouvia as piadas dos adultos da casa, que se divertiam por estar eu a olhar para o jornal como se fosse um muro, que a minha hora de os deixar sem fala chegou, quando, um dia, de um fôlego, li em voz alta, sem titubear, nervoso mas triunfante, umas quantas linhas seguidas.
Source: Small Memories (2006), pp. 87–88

“There is nothing that is truly free nor democratic enough. Make no mistake, the internet did not come to save the world.”

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

Interview with "O Globo", July 2009.

“Globalization is a form of totalitarianism… It is the rich who rule, and the poor live as they can.”

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

Interview with Edney Silvestre, 2007.

“[…], indeed nothing so tires a person as having to struggle, not with himself, but with an abstraction.”

José Saramago book All the Names

Source: All the Names (1997), p. 14

“Let's be guided by norms based on consensus and authority obvious as it is that any variation in the authority varies the consensus, You give no leeway, Because there can be no leeway, we live cooped up in a room and paint the world and the universe on its walls.”

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

Orientamo-nos por normas geradas segundo consensos, e domínios, mete-se pelos olhos dentro que variando o domínio varia o consenso, Não deixas saída, Porque não há saída, vivemos num quarto fechados e pintamos o mundo e o universo nas paredes dele.
Source: The History of the Siege of Lisbon (1989), p. 267

“If I'm sincere today, what does it matter if I regret it tomorrow?”

José Saramago book Blindness

Source: Blindness (1995), p. 290

“The bread was dry and hard, only a scraping of butter was left, he was out of milk, all he had was some rather mediocre coffee, as we know, a man who had never found a woman who would love him enough to agree to join him in this hovel, such a man, apart from rare exceptions which have no place in this story, will never be more than a poor devil, it's odd that we always say poor devil and never poor god, […]”

José Saramago book All the Names

Source: All the Names (1997), p. 100

“But there is another way to speak of all this.”

José Saramago book Raised from the Ground

Source: Raised from the Ground (1980), p. 4

“It is not pornography that is obscene, it is hunger that is obscene.”

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

Não é a pornografia que é obscena, é a fome que é obscena <br class="br"> Interview http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuohB_arwRE&lr=1 Programa Jô Soares, 1997.

“One might ask why Senhor José needs a hundred-yard-long piece of string if the length of the Central Registry, despite successive extensions, is no more than eighty. That is the question of a person who imagines that one can do everything in life simply by following a straight line, that it is always possible to proceed from one place to another by the shortest route, perhaps some people in the outside world believe that they have done so, but here, where the living and the dead share the same space, sometimes, in order to find one of them, you have to make a lot of twists and turns, you have to skirt round mountains of bundles, columns of files, piles of cards, thickets of ancient remains, you have to walk down dark gulleys, between walls of grubby paper which, up above, actually touch, yards and yards of string will have to be unravelled, left behind, like a sinuous, subtle trail traced in the dust, there is no other way of knowing where you have to go next, there is no other way of finding your way back.”

José Saramago book All the Names

Source: All the Names (1997), pp. 140–141

“Once the machine starts to fly, the heavens will be filled with music.”

José Saramago book Baltasar and Blimunda

Voando a máquina, todo o céu será música.
Source: Baltasar and Blimunda (1982), p. 165

“My country is the Portuguese language.”

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

Fernando Pessoa (as Bernardo Soares), in The Book of Disquiet (1982)
Misattributed