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José Saramago

137 quotes

“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 (1922–2010) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 57 (Vintage 2003)
“(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 (1922–2010) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: pp. 58–59 (Vintage 2003)
“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 (1922–2010) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 60 (Vintage 2003)
“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 (1922–2010) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Page 61, 2002 (Harvest Hardcover edition)
“… because contrary to what people say, two weaknesses don't make for a still greater weakness, but for renewed strength ...”
José Saramago (1922–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Very few people are aware that in each of our fingers, located somewhere between the firs phalange, the mesophalange and the metaphalange, there is a tiny brain. [...] It should be noted that fingers are without brains, these develop gradually with the passage of time and with the help of what the eyes see…. That is why the fingers have always excelled at uncovering what is concealed.”
José Saramago (1922–2010) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 64 (Vintage 2003)
“Each part in itself constitutes the whole to which it belongs.”
José Saramago (1922–2010) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 68 (Vintage 2003)
“Age carries with it a double load of guilt,”
José Saramago (1922–2010) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 69 (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 (1922–2010) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 69 (Vintage 2003)
“He felt very tired, not from the mental effort, but because he had suddenly seen what the world was like, how there are many lies and truths,”
José Saramago (1922–2010) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 73 (Vintage 2003)
“After all, we are always on time, behind time, in time, but never out of time, no matter how often we are told that we are.”
José Saramago (1922–2010) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 73 (Vintage 2003)
“Don’t quibble with the king over pears, let him eat the ripe ones and give you the green ones.”
José Saramago (1922–2010) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 78 (Vintage 2003)
“It’s is the old who age a day every hour,”
José Saramago (1922–2010) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 85 (Vintage 2003)
“The best way to killing a rose is to force it open when it is still only the promise of a bud.”
José Saramago (1922–2010) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 89 (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 (1922–2010) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 92 (Vintage 2003)
“Creating is always so much more stimulating than destroying.”
José Saramago (1922–2010) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 107 (Vintage 2003)
“Lord knows why they depict death with wings when death is everywhere.”
José Saramago (1922–2010) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 112 (Vintage 2003)
“Time is a master of ceremonies who always ends up putting us in our rightful place, we advance, stop and retreat according to his orders, our mistake lies in imagination that we can catch him out.”
José Saramago (1922–2010) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 115 (Vintage 2003)
“Human nature is, by definition, a talkative one, imprudent, indiscreet, gossipy, incapable of closing its mouth and keeping it closed.”
José Saramago (1922–2010) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 117(vintage 2003)
“Words were not given to man in order to conceal his thoughts.”
José Saramago (1922–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]here are times when it is best to be content with what one has, so as not to lose everything.”
José Saramago (1922–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Worse still if that sameness should ever become total.”
José Saramago (1922–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No dia seguinte, ninguém morreu.”
José Saramago (1922–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A propósito, não resistiremos a recordar que a morte, por si mesma, sozinha, sem qualquer ajuda externa, sempre matou muito menos que o homem.”
José Saramago (1922–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
José Saramago (1922–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1922–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1922–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Intoxicados mentalmente pela idéia messiânica de um Grande Israel que torne por fim realidade os sonhos expansionistas do sionismo mais radical, contaminados pela monstruosa e arraigada "certeza" de que neste mundo catastrófico e absurdo existe um povo eleito por Deus e, portanto, estão automaticamente justificadas e autorizadas, em nome dos horrores do passado e dos medos de hoje, todas as ações nascidas de um racismo obsessivo, psicológica e patologicamente exclusivista, educados e formados na idéia de que qualquer sofrimento que tenham infligido, inflijam ou venham a infligir aos demais, em especial aos palestinos, sempre será inferior ao que eles padeceram no Holocausto, os judeus arranham sem cessar sua própria ferida para que não deixe de sangrar, para torná-la incurável, e mostram-na ao mundo como se fosse uma bandeira.”
José Saramago (1922–2010) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with El País (2002); cited in Princípios (Editora Anita Garibaldi, 2002), p. 88; English translation taken from Phillips The World Turned Upside Down (2010), p. 207.
“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) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Conference at Fórum Social Mundial, December 2007.
“A mulher do médico vai lendo os letreiros das ruas, lembra-se de uns, de outros não, e chega um momento em que compreende que se desorientou e perdeu. Não há dúvida, está perdida. Deu uma volta, deu outra, já não reconhece nem a ruas nem os nomes delas, então, desesperada, deixou-se cair no chão sujíssimo, empapado de lama negra, e, vazia de forças, de todas as forças, desatou a chorar. Os cães rodearam-na, farejam os sacos, mas sem convicção, como se já lhes tivesse passado a hora de comer, um deles lambe-lhe a cara, talvez desde pequeno tenha sido habituado a enxugar pratos. A mulher toca-lhe na cabeça, passa-lhe a mão pelo lombo encharcado, e o resto das lágrimas chora-as abraçada a ele.”
José Saramago (1922–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1922–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nobody performs her or his duties. Governments do not, because they do not know, they are not able or they do not wish, or because they are not permitted by those who effectively govern the world: The multinational and pluricontinental companies whose power — absolutely non-democratic — reduce to next to nothing what is left of the ideal of democracy. We citizens are not fulfilling our duties either. Let us think that no human rights will exist without symmetry of the duties that correspond to them. It is not to be expected that governments in the next 50 years will do it. Let us common citizens therefore speak up. With the same vehemence as when we demanded our rights, let us demand responsibility over our duties. Perhaps the world could turn a little better.”
José Saramago (1922–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1922–2010) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 9 (Vintage 2003)
“Authoritarian, paralyzing, circular, occasionally elliptical, stock phrases, also jocularly referred to as nuggets of wisdom, are malignant plague, one of the very worst ever to ravage the earth. We say to the confused, Know thyself, as if knowing yourself was not the fifth and most difficult of human arithmetical operations, we say to the apathetic, Where there’s a will, there’s a way, as if the brute realities of the world did not amuse themselves each day by turning that phrase on its head, we say to the indecisive, Begin at the beginning, as if that beginning were the clearly visible point of a loosely wound thread and that all we had to do was to keep pulling until we reached the other end, and as if, between the former and the latter, we had held in our hands a smooth, continuous thread with no knots to untie, no snarled to untangle, a complete impossibility in the life of a skien, or indeed, if we may be permitted on more stock phrase, in the skien of life. … These are the delusions of the pure and unprepared, the beginning is never the clear, precise end of a thread, the beginning is a long, painfully slow process that requires time and patience in order to find out in which direction it is heading, a process that feels its way along the path ahead like a blind man, the beginning is just the beginning, what came before is nigh on worthless.”
José Saramago (1922–2010) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 54 (Vintage 2003)
“You can learn almost everything from reading, But I read too, So you must know something, Now I’m not so sure, You’ll have to read differently then, How, The same method doesn’t work for everyone, each person has to invent his or her own, whichever suits them best, 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, Unless, Unless what, Unless those river don’t just have two shores but many, unless each reader is his or own shore, and that shore is the only shore worth reaching,”
José Saramago (1922–2010) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 60 (Vintage 2003)
“We have an odd relationship with words. We learn a few when we are small, throughout our lives we collect others through education, conversation, our contact with books, and yet, in comparison, there are only a tiny number about whose meaning, sense, and denotation we would have absolutely no doubts if, one day, we were to ask ourselves seriously what they meant. Thus we affirm and deny, thus we convince and are convinced, thus we argue, deduce, and conclude, wandering fearlessly over the surface of concepts about which we have only the vaguest of ideas, and, despite the false air of confidence that we generally affect as we feel our way along the road in the verbal darkness, we manage, more or less, to understand each other and even, sometimes, to find each other.”
José Saramago (1922–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The man changed position, turned his back on the wardrobe blocking the door and let his right arm slide down toward the side on which the dog is lying. A minute later, he was awake. He was thirsty. He turned on his bedside light, got up, shuffled his feet into the slippers which were, as always, providing a pillow for the dog's head, and went into the kitchen. Death followed him. The man filled a glass with water and drank it. At this point, the dog appeared, slaked his thirst in the water-dish next to the back door and then looked up at his master. I suppose you want to go out, said the cellist. He opened the door and waited until the animal came back. A little water remained in his glass. Death looked at it and made an effort to imagine what it must be like to feel thirsty, but failed. She would have been equally incapable of imagining it when she'd had to make people die of thirst in the desert, but at the time she hadn't even tried. The dog returned, wagging his tail. Let's go back to sleep, said the man. They went into the bedroom again, the dog turned around twice, then curled up into a ball. The man drew the sheet up to his neck, coughed twice and soon afterward was asleep again. Sitting in her corner, death was watching. Much later, the dog got up from the carpet and jumped onto the sofa. For the first time in her life, death knew what it felt like to have a dog on her lap.”
José Saramago (1922–2010) said by 2010 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source