José Saramago - All the Names (1997)

17 Sourced Quotes

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

José Saramago
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...

José Saramago
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.

José Saramago
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
[...], 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
That it's possible not to see a lie even when it's in front of us.

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

José Saramago
The skin is only what we want others to see of us, underneath it not even we know who we are.

José Saramago
Consciences keep silence more often than they should, that's why laws were created.

José Saramago
Don't be afraid, the darkness you're in is no greater than the darkness inside your own body, they are two darknesses separated by a skin, I bet you've never thought of that, you carry a darkness about with you all the time and that doesn't frighten you...my dear chap, you have to learn to live with the darkness outside just as you learned to live with the darkness inside

José Saramago
What the eye doesn't see the heart doesn't grieve over.

José Saramago
You know the name you were given,
You do not know the name you have

José Saramago
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.

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

José Saramago
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.

José Saramago
In order to protect the physical hygiene and mental health of the living, we usually bury the dead.

José Saramago