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The wisest man I ever knew in my whole life could not read or write.

Jose Saramago

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Jose Saramago
Age: 87 †
Born: 1922
Born: November 16
Died: 2010
Died: June 18
Chronicler
Diarist
Dramaturge
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Translator
Writer
Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico
Jose Saramago
Ever
Whole
Writing
Men
Life
Wisest
Knew
Read
Write

More quotes by Jose Saramago

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Blessed be the night, which conceals and protects things fair and foul with the same indifferent mantle.
Jose Saramago
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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.
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The beginning is never the clear, precise end of a thread, the beginning is a long, painfully slow process that requires time and patience in order to find out in which direction it is heading, a process that feels its way along the path ahead like a blind man the beginning is just the beginning, what came before is nigh on worthless.
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En ningún momento de la historia, en ningún lugar del planeta, las religiones han servido para que los seres humanos se acerquen unos a los otros. Por el contrario, sólo han servido para separar, para quemar, para torturar. No creo en dios, no lo necesito y además soy buena persona.
Jose Saramago
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The difficult thing isn't living with other people, it's understanding them.
Jose Saramago
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Nothing so tires a person as having to struggle, not with himself, but with an abstraction.
Jose Saramago
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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
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The world had already changed before September 11. The world has been going through a process of change over the last 20 or 30 years. A civilization ends, another one begins.
Jose Saramago
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Words that come from the heart are never spoken, they get caught in the throat and can only be read in ones's eyes.
Jose Saramago
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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.
Jose Saramago
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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
Jose Saramago
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Words were not given to man in order to conceal his thoughts.
Jose Saramago
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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.
Jose Saramago
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One cannot be too careful with words, they change their minds just as people do.
Jose Saramago
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The only time we can talk about death is while we're alive, not afterwards.
Jose Saramago
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The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.
Jose Saramago
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Dignity has no price ... when someone starts making small concessions, in the end life loses all meaning.
Jose Saramago
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If we cannot live entirely like human beings, at least let us do everything in our power not to live entirely like animals.
Jose Saramago
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Strictly speaking, we do not make decisions. Decisions make us.
Jose Saramago
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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.
Jose Saramago