Jose Saramago Quotes

Time and time again one has seen, even in people not particularly given to reflection, that the best way of finding a solution is to let one's thoughts drift until the right moment comes to pounce, like a tiger taking its prey by surprise.

Words that come from the heart are never spoken, they get caught in the throat and can only be read in ones's eyes.

Yes, My Son, man is a piece of wood, that can be used for everything, from the moment he's born until the moment he dies, he's always ready to obey, send him there and he goes, tell him to halt and he stops, tell him to turn back and he retreats, whether in peace or in war, man, generally speaking, is the best thing that could have happened to the gods, And the wood from which I'm made, since I'm a man, what use will it be put to, since I'm Your son, You will be the spoon I shall dip into humanity and bring out laden with men who shall believe in the new god I intend to become, Laden with men You will devour, There's no need for Me to devour those who devour themselves.

Here are times when it is best to be content with what one has, so as not to lose everything.

She was pretty, possibly not the prettiest woman in the audience, but pretty in a very particular, indefinable way that couldn't be put into words, like a line of poetry whose ultimate meaning, if such a thing exists in a line of poetry, continually escapes the translator.

If there is a way for the world to be transformed for the better, it can only be done by pessimism; optimists will never change the world for the better.

Age carries with it a double load of guilt

Put less respectfully, these men and women, standing before the mirror of their life, spit every day in the face of what they were with the sputum of what they are.

Your questions are false if you already know the answer.

Let's hope it isn't fever, she thought. It couldn't be, more likely some infinite weariness, a longing to curl up inside herself, her eyes, especially her eyes, turned inwards, more, more, more, until they could reach and observe inside her own brain, there where the difference between seeing and not seeing is invisible to the naked eye.

Cain considers life and can find no explanation for it, there is that woman, who although clearly sick with desire is enjoying postponing the moment of surrender, which is not at all the right word, because lilith, when she does finally open her legs to allow herself to be penetrated, will not be surrendering, but trying to devour the man to whom she said, Enter.

It's love," thought Abel, "it's love that gives them this calmness, this peace. And suddenly he was gripped by a violent desire to love, to give himself, to find the red flower of love growing in his arid life.

Reading is probably another way of being in a place.

Blindness was spreading, not like a sudden tide flooding everything and carrying all before it, but like an insidious infiltration of a thousand and one turbulent rivulets which, having slowly drenched the earth, suddenly submerge it completely.

It is an unwavering rule for those in power that, when it comes to heads, it is best to cut them off before they start thinking, afterwards, it might be too late.

We know that happiness is short-lived, that we fail to cherish it when it is within our grasp and value it only when it has vanished forever.

You love me because you see me every day. You don't love me for who I am, you love me because of what I do or don't do. You don't know who I am.

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

Like everything else, words have their whys and wherefores. Some call to us solemnly, arrogantly, giving themselves airs, as if they were destined for great things, and then it turns out that they were nothing more than a breeze too light even to set the sail of a windmill moving, whereas other ordinary, habitual words, the sort you use every day, end up having consequences no one would have dared predict, they weren't born for that and yet they shook the world.

We are, more and more, our own defects and not our qualties.
The Elephant's Journey

Don't you know, If you don't step outside yourself, you'll never discover who you are

Certain things can only be understood if we take the trouble to retrace their origins.

The hidden meaning of life . . . But the hidden meaning of life is that life has no hidden meaning.

A human being is a being who is constantly 'under construction,' but also, in a parallel fashion, always in a state of constant destruction.

The flip-flap of Carmen's slippers could be heard out in the corridor, an aggressive sound, more eloquent than any words.

no one could ever put a splint on a frog's leg

There are such moments in life: one unexpectedly discovers that perfection exists, that it, too, is a tiny sphere traveling in time, empty, transparent, luminous, and which sometimes (rarely) comes in our direction and encircles us for a few brief moments before traveling on to other parts and other people.

Words are like that, they deceive, they pile up, it seems they do not know where to go, and, suddenly, because of two or three or four that suddenly come out, simple in themselves, a personal pronoun, an adverb, an adjective, we have the excitement of seeing them coming irresistibly to the surface through the skin and the eyes and upsetting the composure of our feelings, sometimes the nerves that can not bear it any longer, they put up with a great deal, they put up with everything, it was as if they were wearing armor, we might say.

the only thing that lasts a whole lifetime is life itself, everything else is inevitably precarious, unstable, transient

I am a person with leftist convictions, and always have been.

Buying that mask of Beethoven was an impossible dream.

Human beings are known universally as the only animals capable of lying, and while it is true that they sometimes lie out of fear and sometimes out of self-interest, they also occasionally lie because they realize, just in time, that this is the only means available to them of defending the truth.

Having fun is a remedy only for those who don't need one,

Are dreams perhaps the soul's memories of the body,

Where is your brother, he asked, and cain responded with another question. Am I my brother's keeper, You killed him, Yes, I did, but you are the one who is really to blame, I would have given my life for him if you had not destroyed mine, It was a question of putting you to the test, But why put to the test the very thing you yourself created, Because I am the sovereign lord of all things, And of all beings you will say, but not of me and my freedom, What, the freedom to kill, Just as you had the freedom to stop me killing abel, which was perfectly within your capabilities, all you had to do, just for a moment, was to abandon that pride in your infallibility that you share with all the other gods, and, again just for a moment, to be truly merciful and accept my offering with humility, because you shouldn't have refused it, you gods, you and all the others, have a duty to those you claim to have created, This is seditious talk, Yes, possibly, but I can guarantee you that if I were god, I would repeat every day Blessed are those who choose sedition because theirs is the kingdom of the earth, That's sacrilege, Maybe, but no more sacrilegious than you allowing abel to die…

Unlike Joseph her husband, Mary is neither upright nor pious, but she is not blame for this, the blame lies with the language she speaks if not with the men who invented it, because that language has no feminine form for the words upright and pious.

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

When you are old and realize that time is running out, you start imagining that you have the cure for all the ills of the world in your hand, and get frustrated because no one pays you any attention.

I was employed as a salesman, selling a marvelous tea that could cure all ills. Funny, don't you think? I have never lied so much in my life, I traveled all over the country, selling my miraculous tea to whoever would believe me. I never felt guilty about it. The tea didn't do any harm, I can assure you, and my words gave such hope to those who bought it that I reckon they might still owe me money, because hope is beyond price.

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

The devil doesn't make plans, anyway, if men were good, he wouldn't even exist.

I'm not pessimistic. It is the world that is terrible. How can we be optimistic in the face of a planet where people live so badly, nature is being destroyed and the dominant empire is money?

A writer is just like anyone else, he cannot know everything, nor can he experience everything, he must ask and imagine,

[ ... ] with the protecting sky in all its splendour and the golden sun blazing forth against a backdrop of crystalline blue, to use the inspired words of a television reporter[ ... ].

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..

The time for miracles has either passed or not come yet, besides, miracles, genuine miracles, whatever people say, are not such a good idea, if it means destroying the very order of things in order to improve them.

The prime minister's final flourish, Honour your country, for the eyes of the country are upon you, complete with drumrolls and bungle blasts, unearthed from the attics of the mustiest of nationalistic rhetoric, was ruined by a Good night that rang entirely false, but then that is the great thing about ordinary words, they are incapable of deceit.

what is right and what is wrong are simply different ways of understanding our relationships with the others, not that which we have with ourselves

Contrary to what most people think, making a decision is one of the easiest decisions in the world, as is more than proved by the fact that we make decision upon decision throughout the day, there, however, we run straight into the heart of the matter, for these decisions always come to us afterward with their particular little problems, or, to make ourselves quite clear, with their rough edges needing to be smoothed, the first of these problems being our capacity for sticking to a decision and the second our willingness to follow it through.

In a king, modesty would be a sign of weakness.

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.

Blindness is also this, to live in a world where all hope is gone.

Beethoven was ugly too, and no woman ever loved him, and he was Beethoven! He didn't need to be loved in order to do what he did. He just needed to love and he did.

The angel muttered, Oh, no, a rationalist,

Today's bread does not eliminate yesterday's hunger, much less that of tomorrow.

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.

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

It is not only the voice of blood that needs no eyes, love, which people say is blind, also has a voice of its own.

Look what happened with the employment law in France-the law was withdrawn because the people marched in the streets. I think what we need is a global protest movement of people who won't give up.

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 beginning were the clearly visible point of a loosely wound thread and 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 snarls to untangle, a complete impossibility in the life of a skein, or indeed, if we may be permitted one more stock phrase, in the skein of life.

I believe that I've been asked all possible questions. I, myself, if I were a journalist, would not know what to ask me.

Everything in this world can volunteer some reply, what takes up time is posing the questions.

There are people like Senhor José everywhere, who fill their time, or what they believe to be their spare time, by collecting stamps, coins, medals, vases, postcards, matchboxes, books, clocks, sport shirts, autographs, stones, clay figurines, empty beverage cans, little angels, cacti, opera programmes, lighters, pens, owls, music boxes, bottles, bonsai trees, paintings, mugs, pipes, glass obelisks, ceramic ducks, old toys, carnival masks, and they probably do so out of something that we might call metaphysical angst, perhaps because they cannot bear the idea of chaos being the one ruler of the universe, which is why, using their limited powers [...], they attempt to impose some order on the world, and for a short while they manage it, but only as long as they are there to defend their collection, because when the day comes when it must be dispersed, and that day always comes, either with their death or when the collector grows weary, everything goes back to its beginnings, everything returns to chaos.

A man was on his way to the gallows when he met another, who asked him: where are you going, my friend? and the condemned man replied: i'm not going anywhere. they're taking me by force.

I think that after all it might be better to leave things as they are

You and me, your common sense and you, we hardly ever meet to talk, only very occasionally, and, to be perfectly honest, it's hardly ever been worthwhile, That's my fault I suppose, No, it's my fault too, we are obliged by our nature and our condition to follow parallel roads, but the distance that separates or divides us is so great that mostly we don't hear each other

That's how life is, what it gives with one hand one day, it takes away with the other.

I think the novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers. The novel receives streams of science, philosophy, poetry and contains all of these; it's not simply telling a story.

One can show no greater respect than to weep for a stranger.

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'.

Don't ask me what good and what evil are, we knew
what it was each time we had to act when blindness was an ex-
ception, what is right and what is wrong are simply different
ways of understanding our relationships with the others, not that
which we have with ourselves, one should not trust the latter

We all know that each day that dawns is the first for some and will be the last for others, and that for most people it will be just another day.

Fortunately, as human history has shown, it is not unusual for good to come of evil, less is said about the evil that can come out of good

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

This is neither the time nor the place, however, to ponder how often the soul, in order to be able to boast of a clean body, has burdened itself with sadness, envy, and impurity.

how often fears come to sour our life and prove, in the end, to have no foundation, no reason to exist

When all is said and done, what is clear is that all lives end before their time.

Words were not given to man in order to conceal his thoughts

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

The final notes of the funeral march dropped like violets onto the tomb of the hero

Death went on, If I'd sent you, with your taste for expeditious methods, the matter would have been resolved, but times have changed a lot lately, and one has to update the means and the systems one uses, to keep up with the new technologies, by using e-mail, for example, I've heard tell that it's the most hygienic way, one that does away with inkblots and fingerprints, besides which it's fast, you just open up outlook express on microsoft and it's gone, the difficulty would be having to work with two separate archives, one for those who use computers and another for those who don't, anyway, we've got plenty of time to think about it, they're always coming out with new models and new designs, with new improved technologies, perhaps I'll try it some day, but until then, I'll continue to write with pen, paper and ink, it has the charm of tradition, and tradition counts for a lot when it comes to dying.

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

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

Events went on to show that it is not by chance that a prime minister reaches such lofty heights and that, as the infallible wisdom of nations has demonstrated time and time again, each country gets the government it deserves, although it must be said that while it is true to say that prime ministers, for good or ill, are not all the same, it is no less true to say, are all countries.

Because, sir, in case you don't know it, words move, they change from one day to the next, they are as unstable as shadows, are themselves shadows, which both are and have ceased to be, soap bubbles, shells in which one can barely hear a whisper, mere tree stumps.

... that destiny has to make many turnings before arriving anywhere, destiny alone knows what it has cost ...

It is an unvarying rule for those in power that, when it comes to heads, it is best to cut them off before they start to think, afterward, it might be too late.

The moral conscience that so many thoughtless people have offended against and many more have rejected, is something that exists and has always existed. It was not an invention of the philosophers of the Quartenary, when the soul was little more than a muddled proposition. With the passing of time, as well as then 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. Add to this general observation, the particular circumstance that in simple spirits, the remorse caused by committing some evil act often becomes confused with ancestral fears of every kind, and the result will be that the punishment of the prevaricator ends up being, without mercy or pity, twice what he deserved.

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.

From Spain expect only cold winds and cold wives.'" "Ah, so you don't think they get on, then?

The threat of rain appears to have nothing to do with Joao Elvas's desire to be alone, and one must not forget that, strange as it may seem, some men can spend their entire life alone and enjoy solitude, especially if it is raining and their crust is hard.

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.

The church has never been asked to explain anything, our speciality, along with ballistics, has always been the neutralisation of the overly curious mind through faith.

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.

However hard he tried, he could never manage to make himself visible to human eyes and not because he can't, since for him nothing is impossible, it's simply that he wouldn't know what face to wear when introducing himself to the beings he supposedly created and who probably wouldn't recognize him anyway. There are those who say we're very fortunate that god chooses not to appear before us, because compared with the shock we would get were such a thing to happen, our fear of death would be mere child's play. Besides, all the many things that have been said about god and about death are nothing but stories, and this is just another one.

We know that it is the search that gives meaning to any find and that one often has to travel a long way in order to arrive at what is near.

We use words to understand each other and even, sometimes, to find each other.

Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered

The lamb, having survived the storm unharmed and no longer afraid, came up to Jesus and put its mouth to his lips, there was no sniffing, one touch was all that was needed. Jesus opened his eyes, saw the lamb, then the livid sky like a black hand blocking whatever light remained. The olive tree still burned. His bones ached when he tried to move, but at least he was in one piece, if that can be said of a body so fragile that it takes only a clap of thunder to knock it to the ground. He sat up with some effort and reassured himself, more by touch than by sight, that he was neither burned nor paralyzed, none of his bones were broken, and apart from a loud buzzing in his head as insistent as the drone of a trumpet, he was all right. He drew the lamb to him and said, Don't be afraid, He only wanted to show you that you would have been dead by now if that was His will, and to show me that it was not I who saved your life but He. One last rumble of thunder slowly tore the air like a sigh, while below, the white patch of the flock seemed a beckoning oasis.
Struggling to overcome his weakness, Jesus descended the slope. The lamb, kept on its cord simply as a precaution, trotted at his side like a little dog.

Not only does the universe have its own laws, all of them indifferent to the contradictory dreams and desires of humanity, and in the formulation of which we contribute not one iota, apart, that is, from the words by which we clumsily name them, but everything seems to indicate that it uses these laws for aims and objectives that transcend and always will transcend our understanding.