Jose Saramago Quotes - Page 4

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• The problem is that the right doesn't need any ideas to govern, but the left can't govern without ideas.

  Jose Saramago

  Ideas, Needs, Problem

  "Still a street-fighting man". Interview with Stephanie Merritt, www.theguardian.com. April 30, 2006.

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• In a king, modesty would be a sign of weakness.

  Jose Saramago

  Kings, Weakness, Would Be

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• Nothing so tires a person as having to struggle, not with himself, but with an abstraction.

  Jose Saramago

  Struggle, Tire, Persons

  "All the Names" by Jose Saramago, tr. Margaret Jull Costam London: The Harvill Press, (p. 14), 1999.

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

  Jose Saramago

  Stories, Creation Of The Universe, Happened

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• A stomach accustomed to hunger is satisfied with very little.

  Jose Saramago

  Littles, Hunger, Stomach

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• One cannot be too careful with words, they change their minds just as people do.

  Jose Saramago

  People, Mind, Careful

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• 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

  Jose Saramago

  Two, Darkness, Skins

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• Death is present every day in our lives. It's not that I take pleasure in the morbid fascination of it, but it is a fact of life.

  Jose Saramago

  Fascination, Facts, Morbid

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• It is difficult to understand these people who democratically take part in elections and a referendum, but are then incapable of democratically accepting the will of the people.

  Jose Saramago

  People, Election, Accepting

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• I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always cliches, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it provides a more 'productive' literary raw material, but because that is the way we humans really are.

  Jose Saramago

  Positive, Hero, Writing

  "Interview with Jose Saramago, Author of Blindness". Political Affairs Magazine Interview, www.politicalaffairs.net. March 2006.

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• 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.

  Jose Saramago

  Believe, Doe, Moments

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• Abstention means you stayed at home or went to the beach. By casting a blank vote, you're saying that you understand your responsibility, you have a political conscience and you came to vote, but you don't agree with any of the existing parties and this is the only way you have of saying so.

  Jose Saramago

  Beach, Party, Mean

  "Still a street-fighting man". Interview with Stephanie Merritt, www.theguardian.com. April 30, 2006.

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• 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?

  Jose Saramago

  Optimistic, People, Empires

  "Desventuras em serie". Interview with Luis Antonio Giron in Sao Paulo for Epoca Magazine (in Portuguese), translated, 2005.

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• 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.

  Jose Saramago

  Distance, Lying, Sleep

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• The minds of human beings are not always entirely at one with the world in which they live, some people have trouble adjusting to reality, basically they're just weak, confused spirits who use words, sometimes very skillfully, to justify their cowardice.

  Jose Saramago

  Confused, Reality, People

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• Each part in itself constitutes the whole to which it belongs.

  Jose Saramago

  Whole

  "The Cave" by Jose Saramago, tr. Margaret Jull Costa, Vintage, (p. 68), 2003.

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• blindness is a private matter between a person and the eyes with which he or she was born.

  Jose Saramago

  Eye, Matter, Born

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• In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn't know how to write essays.

  Jose Saramago

  Writing, Novelists, Essays

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• Can you imagine what Bush would say if someone like Hugo Chavez asked him for a little piece of land to install a military base, and he only wanted to plant a Venezuelan flag there?

  Jose Saramago

  Military, Land, Flags

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• 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.

  Jose Saramago

  Jobs, Writing, Two

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• I am traveling less in order to be able to write more. I select my travel destinations according to their degree of usefulness to my work.

  Jose Saramago

  Travel, Writing, Order

  "A Writer's Progress: An Interview with Nobel Prize-Winning Portuguese Novelist José Saramago". Interview with Anna Klobucka, masshumanities.org. Spring 2002.

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• 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.

  Jose Saramago

  Moving, Thinking, Firsts

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• Not only does the universe have its own laws, all of them indifferent to the contradictory dreams and desires of humanity, and in the formulation of which we contribute not one iota, apart, that is, from the words by which we clumsily name them, but everything seems to indicate that it uses these laws for aims and objectives that transcend and always will transcend our understanding.

  Jose Saramago

  Dream, Law, Names

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• I write to try to understand, and because I have nothing better to do.

  Jose Saramago

  Writing, Trying

  "Saramago diz que escreve por não ter 'nada melhor para fazer'". www1.folha.uol.com.br. April 2, 2007.

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• The only miracle we can perform is to go on living, said the woman, to preserve the fragility of life from day to day, as if it were blind and did not know where to go, and perhaps it is like that, perhaps it really does not know, it placed itself in our hands, after giving us intelligence.

  Jose Saramago

  Hands, Giving, Miracle

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