José Saramago Quotes

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

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.

He could see perfectly well that "it," his life, was leading nowhere, that he wss behaving like a miser who hoards gold simply for the pleasure of looking at it, except that in his case it wssn't gold but experience, which was the one thing he took from life. And yet experience, unless applied to something, is just like that hoard of gold, for it neither produces nor bears fruit and is utterly useless. There is no point in a man accumulating experience the way someone else might collect stamps.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Men are all the same, they think that because they came out of the belly of a woman they know all there is to know about women.

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.

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 and with no divine help, 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.

We all have our moments of weakness, just as well that we are capable of weeping, tears are often our salvation, there are times when we would die if we did not weep…

...the human being to lack that second skin we call egoism has not yet been born, it lasts much longer than the other one, that bleeds so readily.

We are so afraid of the idea of having to die… that we always try to find excuses for the dead, as if we were asking beforehand to be excused when it is our turn…

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.