JOSÉ SARAMAGO QUOTES
Portuguese novelist, poet, and playwright (1922-2010)
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Death has no need to be cruel, taking people's lives is more than enough.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO, Death with Interruptions
We can escape from everything, but not from ourselves.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO, Baltasar and Blimunda
Death ... doesn't take her eyes off us for a minute, so much so that even those who are not yet due to die feel her gaze pursuing them constantly.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO, Death with Interruptions
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.
Men are angels born without wings, nothing could be nicer than to be born without wings and to make them grow.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO, Baltasar and Blimunda
Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO, The Double
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.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
For me, writing is a job. I do not separate the work from the act of writing like two things that have nothing to do with each other. I arrange words one after another, or one in front of another, to tell a story, to say something that I consider important or useful, or at least important or useful to me. It is nothing more than this.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO, The Paris Review, winter 1998
Each day is a little bit of history.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO, Baltasar and Blimunda
One cannot be too careful with words, they change their minds just as people do.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO, Death with Interruptions
Consciences keep silence more often than they should, that's why laws were created.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO, All the Names
Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.
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.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO, The Notebook
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.
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.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO, The Double
The much-quoted immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary occurred but once so that the world might know that Almighty God, when He so chooses, has no need of men, though He cannot dispense with women.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO, Baltasar and Blimunda
Somewhere in the infinite that He occupies, God advances and withdraws the pawns of the other games He plays, but it is too soon to worry about this one, all He need do for the present is allow things to take their natural course, apart from the occasional adjustment with the tip of His little finger to make sure some stray thought or action does not interfere with the harmony of destinies.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ
Just as the habit does not make the monk, the sceptre does not make the king.
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.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO, Death at Intervals
I don’t believe in the notion that some characters have lives of their own and the author follows after them. The author has to be careful not to force the character to do something that would go against the logic of that character’s personality, but the character does not have independence. The character is trapped in the author’s hand, in my hand, but he is trapped in a way he does not know he is trapped. The characters are on strings, but the strings are loose; the characters enjoy the illusion of freedom, of independence, but they cannot go where I do not want them to go. When that happens, the author must pull on the string and say to them, I am in charge here.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO, The Paris Review, winter 1998
The wise man contents himself with what he has, until such time as he invents something better.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO, Baltasar and Blimunda
Perfect moments, especially when they verge on the sublime have the grave disadvantage of being very short lived, which in fact, being obvious, we would not need to mention were it not that they have a still greater disadvantage, which is that we do not know what to do once they are over.
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.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO, The Tale of the Unknown Island
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.
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.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO, All the Names
It takes little or nothing to undo reputations, the merest trifle makes and remakes them, it is simply a question of finding the best means of engaging the confidence or interest of those who are to become one's unsuspecting echoes or accomplices.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO, Baltasar and Blimunda
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 worst pain ... isn't the pain you feel at the time, it's the pain you feel later on when there's nothing you can do about it. They say that time heals all wounds, But we never live long enough to test that theory.
I don’t think it is worth explaining how a character’s nose or chin looks. It is my feeling that readers will prefer to construct, little by little, their own character—the author will do well to entrust the reader with this part of the work.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO, The Paris Review, winter 1998
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.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ
Nothing so tires a person as having to struggle, not with himself, but with an abstraction.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO, All the Names
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.
Liking is probably the best form of ownership, and ownership the worst form of liking.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO, The Tale of the Unknown Island
Your questions are false if you already know the answer.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO, The Stone Raft
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.
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.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO, All the Names
God's knowledge is like a river coursing towards the sea, God is the source and men are the ocean.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO, Baltasar and Blimunda
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.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ
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