José Saramago

From Wikiquote

José de Sousa Saramago, GCSE (born 1922-11-16) is a Portuguese writer, playwright and journalist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998. He founded the National Front for the Defense of Culture (Lisbon, 1992) with Freitas-Magalhães among others.

Contents 1 Sourced 1.1 All the Names (1997) 1.2 The Cave (2001) 1.3 Blindness 2 Unsourced 3 External links

[edit] Sourced

[edit] All the Names (1997)

Todos os Nomes (1997); tr. Margaret Jull Costa, London: The Harvill Press, 1999, ISBN 0151004218

• You know the name you were given,
  You do not know the name you have
  • "The book of certainties"

• No life is without its lies.
  • p. 172

• 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,
  • p. 172

• In order to protect the physical hygiene and mental health of the living, we usually bury the dead.
• p. 181

• What the eye doesn’t see the heart doesn’t grieve over.
  • p. 185

• That it’s possible not to see a lie even when it’s in front of us.
  • p. 210

• 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.
  • p. 2

• The caressing, melodious tones of humility and flattery never sang in the ears of the clerk Senhor José, these have never had a place in the chromatic scale of feelings normally shown to him.

• [...], indeed nothing so tires a person as having to struggle, not with himself, but with an abstraction.

• None of his colleagues noticed who had arrived, they responded to his greetings as they always did, Good morning, Senhor José, they said and they did not know to whom they were speaking.

• [...], perhaps that's how you learn, by answering questions.

• 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.
  • The woman in the ground floor flat

• Consciences keep silence more often than they should, that's why laws were created.
  • The Registrar

• The bread was dry and hard, only a scraping of butter was left, he was out of milk, all he had was some rather mediocre coffee, as we know, a man who had never found a woman who would love him enough to agree to join him in this hovel, such a man, apart from rare exceptions which have no place in this story, will never be more than a poor devil, it's odd that we always say poor devil and never poor god, [...]

• [...] the skin is only what we want others to see of us, underneath it not even we know who we are, [...]
  • Senhor José's ceiling

• [...], 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.

[edit] The Cave (2001)

A Caverna (2001); tr. Margaret Jull Costa, Vintage, 2003; Harvest, 2002, ISBN 0151004145

• The young have the ability, but lack the wisdom, and the old have the wisdom, but lack the ability.
  • p. 4 (Vintage 2003)

• 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,
  • p. 9 (Vintage 2003)

• Destiny isn’t taken in by people trying to make what came first come afterwards.
  • p. 12 (Vintage 2003)

• There comes a point when the confused or abused person hears a voice saying in his head, Oh well, might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, and, depending on the particular situation in which he finds him he either spends his last bit of money on a lottery ticket, or places on the gaming table the watch he inherited from his father and silver cigarette case that was a gift from his mother, or bets everything he has on red even though he knows that red has come up five times in a row,
  • p. 14 (Vintage 2003)

• Even the strongest spirits have the moments of irresistible weakness,
  • p. 15 (Vintage 2003)

• We would know far more about life’s complexities if we applied ourselves to the close study of its contradictions instead of wasting so much time on similarities and connections, which should anyway, be self-explanatory.
  • p. 15 (Vintage 2003)

• There is relationship between sight and touch, something about eyes being able to see through the fingers touching the clay, about fingers being able to feel what the eyes are seeing without the fingers actually touching it.
  • p. 20 (Vintage 2003)

• Earthenware is like people, it needs to be well treated.
  • p. 21 (Vintage 2003)

• The only time we can talk about death is while we’re alive, not afterwards.
  • p. 22 (Vintage 2003)

• 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.
  • p. 28 (Vintage 2003)

• I don’t doubt that a man can live perfectly well on his own, but I’m convinced that he begins to die as soon as he closes the door of his house behind him.
  • p. 29 (Vintage 2003)

• He spent the whole time sitting on a log in the woodshed, sometimes starting straight ahead with the fixity of a blind man who knows that even if he turns his head in the other direction he will still not see anything,
  • p. 30 (Vintage 2003)

• At this time of life even a day makes a difference, the only saving grace is that sometimes things improve.
  • p. 43 (Vintage 2003)

• Where do begin, he asked, Where you always have to begin, at the beginning,
  • p. 53 (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
  • p. 54 (Vintage 2003)

• 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 night on worthless.
  • p. 54 (Vintage 2003)

• 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.
  • 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,
  • pp. 58–59 (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,
  • p. 60 (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,
  • 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.
  • 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 ...

• 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.
  • p. 64 (vintage 2003)

• Each part in itself constitutes the whole to which it belongs.
  • p. 68 (vintage 2003)

• Age carries with it a double load of guilt,
  • 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.
  • 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,
  • 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.
  • p. 73 (vintage 2003)

• Don’t quibble with the king over pears, let him eat the ripe ones and give you the green ones.
  • p. 78 (vintage 2003)

• It’s is the old who age a day every hour,
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • p. 92 (vintage 2003)

• Creating is always so much more stimulating than destroying.

• P107 (vintage 2003)

• Lord knows why they depict death with wings when death is everywhere.

• P112(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.

• p115(vintage 2003)

• human nature is, by definition ,a talkative one, imprudent, indiscreet, gossipy, incapable of closing its mouth and keeping it closed.

• P117(vintage 2003)

[edit] Blindness

• Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.
• Blind people do not need a name, I am my voice, nothing else matters.

[edit] Unsourced

• All the scheming and plotting in the world won't result in something lasting, transcendent. Anything that's authentic, that's real, comes in the form of a gift. Even if by accident.

• Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt.

• I think we are blind. Blind people who can see, but do not see.

• 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.

• 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.

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

• 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.

• What kind of world is this that can send machines to Mars and does nothing to stop the killing of a human being?

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

[edit] External links