José Saramago Quotes

147 Sourced Quotes

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

José Saramago
All stories are like those about the creation of the universe, no one was there, no one witnessed anything, yet everyone knows what happened.

José Saramago
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?

José Saramago
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
[...], 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.

José Saramago
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'.

José Saramago
At this time of life even a day makes a difference, the only saving grace is that sometimes things improve.

José Saramago
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
A stomach accustomed to hunger is satisfied with very little.

José Saramago
The ear has to be educated if one wishes to appreciate musical sounds, just as the eyes must learn to distinguish the value of words.

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

José Saramago
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.

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

José Saramago
Often when you ask for one thing you receive another, this is the mysterious thing about prayer, we address them to heaven with some private intention, but they choose their own path, sometimes they delay, allowing other prayers to overtake them, frequently they overlap and become hybrid prayers of dubious origin, which quarrel and argue among themselves.

José Saramago
No human being can achieve all he or she desires in this life except in dreams, so good night all.

José Saramago
Strictly speaking, we do not make decisions. Decisions make us.

José Saramago
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
Death has no need to be cruel, taking people's lives is more than enough.

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

José Saramago
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
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.

José Saramago
One of the great fallacies of our age is democratic discourse.

José Saramago
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. I don't have any of those problems, but I do have problems just like any other person doing any other type of work.

José Saramago
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. Of course, if I feel sorrow, I feel it, but I do not . . . Let me say it another way: I do not look for ways of being interesting.

José Saramago
That is the dream, I suppose, of all novelists—that one of their characters will become 'somebody.'

José Saramago
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.

José Saramago
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

José Saramago
But it is also true, if this brings her any consolation, that if, before every action, we were to begin weighing up the consequences, thinking about them in earnest, first the immediate consequences, then the probably, then the possible, then the imaginable ones, we should never move beyond the point where our first thought brought us to a halt.

José Saramago
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.

José Saramago