“The wisest man I ever knew in my whole life could not read or write. At four o'clock in the morning, when the promise of a new day still lingered over French lands, he got up from his pallet and left for the fields, taking to pasture the half-dozen pigs whose fertility nourished him and his wife…”

— José Saramago

Referring to his grandfather, Jerónimo Meirinho.
Nobel Lecture (1998)

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José Saramago 138

Portuguese writer and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in … 1922–2010

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