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José Saramago Quotes
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José de Sousa Saramago, GColSE , was a Portuguese writer and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature. His works, some of which can be seen as allegories, commonly present subversive perspectives on historic events, emphasizing the theopoetic human factor. In 2003 Harold Bloom described Saramago as "the most gifted novelist alive in the world today" and in 2010 said he considers Saramago to be "a permanent part of the Western canon", while James Wood praises "the distinctive tone to his fiction because he narrates his novels as if he were someone both wise and ignorant."More than two million copies of Saramago's books have been sold in Portugal alone and his work has been translated into 25 languages. A proponent of libertarian communism, Saramago criticized institutions such as the Catholic Church, the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. An atheist, he defended love as an instrument to improve the human condition. In 1992, the Government of Portugal under Prime Minister Aníbal Cavaco Silva ordered the removal of The Gospel According to Jesus Christ from the Aristeion Prize's shortlist, claiming the work was religiously offensive. Disheartened by this political censorship of his work, Saramago went into exile on the Spanish island of Lanzarote, upon which he resided until his death in 2010.Saramago was a founding member of the National Front for the Defense of Culture in Lisbon in 1992, and co-founder with Orhan Pamuk, of the European Writers' Parliament .

✵ 16. November 1922 – 18. June 2010
José Saramago photo
José Saramago: 138 quotes146 likes

José Saramago Quotes

“Be content to bless each other, that is all the blessing you need, and how I wish that all blessings were so.”

José Saramago book Baltasar and Blimunda

Abençoem-se antes um ao outro, é quanto basta, pudessem ser todas as bênçãos como essa.
Source: Baltasar and Blimunda (1982), p. 175

“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.”

José Saramago book The Cave

A vida é assim, está cheia de palavras que não valem a pena, ou que valeram e já não valem, cada uma que ainda formos dizendo tirará o lugar a outra mais merecedora, que o seria não tanto por si mesma, mas pelas consequências de tê-la dito.
Source: The Cave (2000), p. 28 (Vintage 2003)

“No life is without its lies.”

José Saramago book All the Names

Source: All the Names (1997), p. 172

“[…] the skin is only what we want others to see of us, underneath it not even we know who we are, […]”

José Saramago book All the Names

Senhor José's ceiling; p. 132
All the Names (1997)

“Our biggest tragedy is not knowing what to do with our lives.”

José Saramago

Nossa maior tragédia é não saber o que fazer com a vida.
During the opening lecture of the course Literature and power. Lights and shadows, in the University Carlos III in Madrid. As quoted by Marco Aurélio Weissheimer in the article Saramago prega retorno à filosofia para salvar democracia, na Agência Carta Maior. (January 19th, 2004)

“Doesn't anybody understand that killing in the name of God only makes Him a murderer?”

José Saramago

Interview with Edney Silvestre, 2007.

“Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be what they truly are.”

José Saramago book Blindness

Source: Blindness (1995), p. 126

“(a picture of)a naked woman, although she was covering her pubis with her right hand and her breasts with her left. _ _ _ _ covering yourself up like that is worse than showing everything”

José Saramago book The Cave

Source: The Cave (2000), pp. 58–59 (Vintage 2003)

“The emptiness of old age had caused him to forget that, in matters of feeling and of the heart, too much is always better than too little.”

José Saramago book The Cave

Source: The Cave (2000), p. 69 (Vintage 2003)

“[…], old photographs are very deceiving, they give us the illusion that we are alive in them, and it's not true, the person we are looking at no longer exists, and if that person could see us, he or she would not recognise him or herself in us, Who's that looking at me so sadly, he or she would say.”

José Saramago book All the Names

Source: All the Names (1997), p. 153

“How are you, doctor, 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, a phenomenon that has only been observed in the human species.”

José Saramago book Blindness

Source: Blindness (1995), p. 32

“My problem in this situation is to know whether I should have blushed before or if l should be blushing now, I can recall having seen you blush once, When, When I touched the rose in your office, Women blush more easily than men, we're the weaker sex, Both sexes are weak, I was also blushing, How come you know so much about the weakness of the sexes, I know my own weakness, and something about the weakness of others.”

José Saramago

O meu problema, nesta situação, é saber se já deveria ter corado antes, ou se é agora que devo corar, Lembro-me de a ter visto corar uma vez, Quando, Quando toquei na rosa que estava no seu gabinete, As mulheres coram mais que os homens, somos o sexo frágil, Ambos os sexos são frágeis, eu também corei, Sabe assim tanto da fragilidade dos sexos, Sei da minha própria fragilidade, e alguma coisa da dos outros.
Source: The History of the Siege of Lisbon (1989), p. 219

“He got out of the van to see how many other suppliers were ahead of him and thus calculate, more or less accurately, how long he would have to wait. He was number thirteen, he counted again, no, there was no doubt about it. Although he was not a suspirations person, he knew about that number’s bad reputation, in any conversation about chance, fate or destiny, someone always chips in with some real-life experience of the negative, even fatal influence of the number thirteen. He tried to remember if he had ever been in this place in the queue before, but the long and the short of it was that either it had never happened or else he had simply forgotten. he got annoyed with himself, it was nonsense, utterly absurd to worry about something that has no real existence, yes, that was right, he had never thought of that before, numbers don’t really exist, things couldn’t care less what number we give them, its all the same to them if we say they’re number thirteen or number forty-four, we can conclude, at the very least, that they do not even notice the position they happen to end up in. people aren’t things, people always want to be in first place”

José Saramago book The Cave

Source: The Cave (2000), p. 9 (Vintage 2003)

“Fumbling in total darkness, they reached out to each other, naked, he penetrated her with desire and she received him eagerly, and they exchanged eagerness and desire until their bodies were locked in embrace, their movements in harmony, her voice rising from the depth of her being, his totally submerged, the cry that is born, prolonged, truncated, that muffled sob, that unexpected tear, and the machine trembles and shudders, probably no longer even on the ground but, having rent the screen of brambles and undergrowth, is now hovering at dead of night amid the clouds, Blimunda, Baltasar, his body weighing on hers, and both weighing on the earth, for at last they are here, having gone and returned.”

José Saramago book Baltasar and Blimunda

Em profunda escuridão se procuraram, nus, sôfrego entrou nela, ela o recebeu ansiosa, depois a sofreguidão dela, a ânsia dele, enfim os corpos encontrados, os movimentos, a voz que vem do ser profundo, aquele que não tem voz, o grito nascido, prolongado, interrompido, o soluço seco, a lágrima inesperada, e a máquina a tremer, a vibrar, porventura não está já na terra, rasgou a cortina de silvas e enleios, pairou no alto da noite, entre as nuvens, pesa o corpo dele sobre o dela, e ambos pesam sobre a terra, afinal estão aqui, foram e voltaram.
Source: Baltasar and Blimunda (1982), pp. 255–256

“It’s is the old who age a day every hour”

José Saramago book The Cave

Source: The Cave (2000), p. 85 (Vintage 2003)

“Consciences keep silence more often than they should, that's why laws were created.”

José Saramago book All the Names

The Registrar
All the Names (1997)

“When the lord, also known as god, realised that adam and eve, although perfect in every outward aspect, could not utter a word or make even the most primitive of sounds, he must have felt annoyed with himself, for there was no one else in the garden of eden whom he could blame for this grave oversight…”

José Saramago book Cain

Source: Cain (2009), p. 1

“This Jerónimo, my grandfather, swineherd and story-teller, feeling death about to arrive and take him, went and said goodbye to the trees in the yard, one by one, embracing them and crying because he knew he wouldn't see them again.”

José Saramago

Nobel Lecture (1998)

“… because contrary to what people say, two weaknesses don't make for a still greater weakness, but for renewed strength …”

José Saramago book The Cave

The Cave (2000)

“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.”

José Saramago book The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis

Source: The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1993), p. 47

“Ah, who will write the history of what might have been?”

José Saramago

Fernando Pessoa (as Álvaro de Campos), quoted by José Saramago in The Stone Raft (1986), p. 9
Misattributed

“That it’s possible not to see a lie even when it’s in front of us.”

José Saramago book All the Names

Source: All the Names (1997), p. 210

“Worse still if that sameness should ever become total.”

José Saramago book The Double

The Double (2002)

“Then Jesus slowly turned to look at her and said, I have never been with a woman. Mary held his hands, This is how everyone has to begin, men who have never known a woman, women who have never known a man, until the day comes for the one who knows to teach the one who does not.”

José Saramago book The Gospel According to Jesus Christ

Então Jesus voltou lentamente o rosto para ela e disse. Não conheço mulher. Maria segurou-lhe as mãos, Assim temos de começar todos, homens que não conheciam mulher, mulheres que não conheciam homem, um dia o que sabia ensinou, o que não sabia aprendeu.
Source: The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991), p. 235

“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. Sometimes scorpions crawl out or centipedes, fat white caterpillars or ripe chrysalises, but it's not impossible that, at least once, an elephant might appear…”

José Saramago book The Elephant's Journey

Source: The Elephant's Journey (2008), p. 18

“The best way to killing a rose is to force it open when it is still only the promise of a bud.”

José Saramago book The Cave

Source: The Cave (2000), p. 89 (Vintage 2003)

“To me, the Bible is a book. Important, no doubt, but a book.”

José Saramago

Interview to the newspaper "O Globo", 2009.

“Age carries with it a double load of guilt”

José Saramago book The Cave

Source: The Cave (2000), p. 69 (Vintage 2003)

“Every thing in life is a uniform; the only time our bodies are truly in civilian dress is when we’re naked.”

José Saramago book The Cave

Source: The Cave (2000), p. 92 (Vintage 2003)

“[T]here are times when it is best to be content with what one has, so as not to lose everything.”

José Saramago book The Double

The Double (2002)

“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.”

José Saramago

Interview with "El País", 2009.

“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

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

“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

“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)

“…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

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

“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.

“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)

“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

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

“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

Interview with "O Globo", July 2009.

“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

“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

Interview with Edney Silvestre, 2007.

“The universe has no news of our existence.”

José Saramago

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

“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)

“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)

“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)

“My country is the Portuguese language.”

José Saramago

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

“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

“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

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

José Saramago

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&amp;lr=1 Programa Jô Soares, 1997.

“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