Jose Saramago (1922 – 2010)
Portuguese novelist, poet, playwright and journalist.
The possibility of the impossible, dreams and illusions, are the subject of my novels.
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.
In order to protect the physical hygiene and mental health of the living, we usually bury the dead.
If I could repeat my childhood, I would repeat it exactly as it was, with the poverty, the cold, little food, with the flies and pigs, all that.
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.
Lord knows why they depict death with wings when death is everywhere.
What the eye doesn’t see the heart doesn’t grieve over.
... because contrary to what people say, two weaknesses don't make for a still greater weakness, but for renewed strength ...
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.
Earthenware is like people, it needs to be well treated.
[...], indeed nothing so tires a person as having to struggle, not with himself, but with an abstraction.
Don’t quibble with the king over pears, let him eat the ripe ones and give you the green ones.
There is nothing that is truly free nor democratic enough. Make no mistake, the internet did not come to save the world.
That it’s possible not to see a lie even when it’s in front of us.
Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.
Ah, who will write the history of what might have been?
I write to try to understand, and because I have nothing better to do.
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.
I believe that I've been asked all possible questions. I, myself, if I were a journalist, would not know what to ask me.
The universe has no news of our existence.