Jose Saramago quotes

Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.
-- Jose Saramago

#Names #Soul

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

#Doe #Machines #Mars

Men are angels born without wings, nothing could be nicer than to be born without wings and to make them grow.
-- Jose Saramago

#Angel #Men #Wings

The world is governed by institutions that are not democratic - the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO.
-- Jose Saramago

#Imf #World #Institutions

... that's how life should be, when one person loses heart, the other must have heart and courage enough for both.
-- Jose Saramago

#Heart #Enough #Should

...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

#Lying #Distance #Sleep

Some people spend their entire lives reading but never get beyond reading the words on the page, they don't understand that the words are merely stepping stones placed across a fast-flowing river, and the reason they're there is so that we can reach the farther shore, it's the other side that matters.
-- Jose Saramago

#Inspirational #Life #Reading

A journey never ends. Only the travellers end.
-- Jose Saramago

#Death #Journey #Ends

If you don't write your books, nobody else will do it for you. No one else has lived your life.
-- Jose Saramago

#Book #Writing

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

#Block #Writing #Creating

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

#Laughing #Different #Movement

As citizens, we all have an obligation to intervene and become involved - it's the citizen who changes things.
-- Jose Saramago

#House #Citizens #Obligation

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

#People #Election #Accepting

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

#Knowing #Vocabulary #Communicate

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

#Fashion #Construction #Destruction

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

#Marriage #Men #People

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

#Jobs #Literature #Possibility

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

#Rivers #East #Village

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

#Mistake #Writing #School

Liking is probably the best form of ownership, and ownership the worst form of liking.
-- Jose Saramago

#Liking Someone #Ownership #Form

Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered
-- Jose Saramago

#Order #Perspective #Waiting

With the passing of time, as well as the social evolution and genetic exchange, we ended up putting our conscience in the colour of blood and in the salt of tears, and, as if that were not enough, we made our eyes into a kind of mirror turned inwards, with the result that they often show without reserve what we are verbally trying to deny.
-- Jose Saramago

#Eye #Blood #Mirrors

It is economic power that determines political power, and governments become the political functionaries of economic power.
-- Jose Saramago

#Government #Political #Economic

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

#Positive #Hero #Writing

...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

#Mean #Islands #Order

One cannot be too careful with words, they change their minds just as people do.
-- Jose Saramago

#People #Mind #Careful

...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

#Light #Shadow #Body

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

#Heart #Eye #Caught

blindness is a private matter between a person and the eyes with which he or she was born.
-- Jose Saramago

#Eye #Matter #Born

...the habit of falling hardens the body, reaching the ground, to in itself, is a relief.
-- Jose Saramago

#Fall #Relief #Body

You know the name you were given, you do not know the name that you have
-- Jose Saramago

#Names #Given

Words have their own hierarchy, their own protocol, their own artistic titles, their own plebeian stigmas.
-- Jose Saramago

#Titles #Hierarchy #Artistic

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

#Blood #Color #Tears

We never consider that the things dogs know about us are things of which we have not the faintest notion.
-- Jose Saramago

#Dog #Notion

The virtue of maps, they show what can be done with limited space, they foresee that everything can happen therein.
-- Jose Saramago

#Space #Done #Maps

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

#Nice #Animal #Roots

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

#Identity #Coherence #Wasting Time

Just as the habit does not make the monk, the sceptre does not make the king.
-- Jose Saramago

#Kings #Doe #Monk

A tree weeps when cut down, a dog howls when beaten, but a man matures when offended.
-- Jose Saramago

#Dog #Cutting #Men

We've all had our moments of weakness, and if we manage to get through today without any, we'll be sure to have some tomorrow.
-- Jose Saramago

#Weakness #Today #Tomorrow

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

#Needs #Faces #Blame

As so often happens, the thing left undone tires you most of all, you only feel rested when it has been accomplished.
-- Jose Saramago

#Tire #Undone #Accomplished

...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

#Skins #Lasts #Born

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

#Ideas #Trying #Asking

If I'm sincere today, what does it matter if I regret it tomorrow?
-- Jose Saramago

#Regret #Does It Matter #Today

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

#Winning #Hands #Gambling

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

#Sleep #Goes On #Should

It is strange how the elderly fall silent when they ought to go on speaking, obliging the young to learn everything from scratch.
-- Jose Saramago

#Fall #Elderly #Scratches

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

#Believe #Doe #Moments

In a king, modesty would be a sign of weakness.
-- Jose Saramago

#Kings #Weakness #Would Be

Ah, in every age there is always some new wonder to astound mankind until they grow accustomed to it and lose interest.
-- Jose Saramago

#Age #Wonder #Mankind

Forgive me if what has seemed little to you, to me is all.
-- Jose Saramago

#Forgive Me #Forgiving #Littles

Every second that passes is like a door that opens to allow in what has not yet happened, what we call the future, but, to challenge the contradictory nature of what we have just said, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the future is just an immense void, that the future is just the time on which the eternal present feeds.
-- Jose Saramago

#Doors #Challenges #Void

Don't be afraid, the darkness you're in is no greater than the darkness inside your own body, they are two darknesses separated by a skin, I bet you've never thought of that, you carry a darkness about with you all the time and that doesn't frighten you...my dear chap, you have to learn to live with the darkness outside just as you learned to live with the darkness inside
-- Jose Saramago

#Two #Darkness #Skins

Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be what they truly are.
-- Jose Saramago

#World #Blind

I consider books to be good for our health, and also our spirits, and they help us to become poets or scientists, to understand the stars or else to discover them deep within the aspirations of certain characters, those who sometimes, on certain evenings, escape from the pages and walk among us humans, perhaps the most human of us all.
-- Jose Saramago

#Stars #Book #Character

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

#Secret #Moments #Born

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

#Writing #Men #Past

...in matters of feeling and of the heart, too much is always better than too little.
-- Jose Saramago

#Heart #Feelings #Littles

...sometimes we ask ourselves why happiness took so long to arrive, why it didn't come sooner, but appears suddenly, as now, when we've given up hope of it ever arriving, it's likely then that we won't know what to do, and rather than it being a question of choosing between laughter and tears, we will be filled by a secret anxiety to which we might not know how to respond at all.
-- Jose Saramago

#Laughter #Long #Anxiety

Why did we become blind, I don't know, perhaps one day we'll find out, 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.
-- Jose Saramago

#Thinking #People #One Day

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

#Needs #Bread #Existence

As my cat would say, all hours are good for sleeping.
-- Jose Saramago

#Sleep #Cat #Hours

The possibility of the impossible, dreams and illusions, are the subject of my novels.
-- Jose Saramago

#Dream #Impossible #Illusion

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

#Confused #Reality #People

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

#Fragility #World #Intensity

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

#Writing #Novelists #Novel

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

#Needs #Use #Might

The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.
-- Jose Saramago

#Sea #Rivers #Space

The U.S. needs to control the Middle East, the gateway to Asia. It already has military installations in Uzbekistan.
-- Jose Saramago

#Easter #Military #Uzbekistan

When I am occupied with a work that requires continuity - a novel, for example - I write every day.
-- Jose Saramago

#Writing #Example #Novel

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

#Positive #Usa #America

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

#Years #World #Letters

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

#Thinking #Political #Atmosphere

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

#Book #Writing #Who I Am

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

#Travel #Writing #Order

I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist.
-- Jose Saramago

#Novelists #Poetic #Poet

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

#Fascination #Facts #Morbid

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

#Luck #Birth #Made