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You know the name you were given, you do not know the name that you have

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
Name
Names
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More quotes by Jose Saramago

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When I am occupied with a work that requires continuity - a novel, for example - I write every day.
Jose Saramago
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The possibility of the impossible, dreams and illusions, are the subject of my novels.
Jose Saramago
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... that's how life should be, when one person loses heart, the other must have heart and courage enough for both.
Jose Saramago
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It is strange how the elderly fall silent when they ought to go on speaking, obliging the young to learn everything from scratch.
Jose Saramago
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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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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
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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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A writer is a man like any other: he dreams. And my dream was to be able to say of this book, when I finished: 'This is a book about Alentejo.'
Jose Saramago
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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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The wise man contents himself with what he has, until such time as he invents something better.
Jose Saramago
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With the passing of time, as well as the social evolution and genetic exchange, we ended up putting our conscience in the colour of blood and in the salt of tears, and, as if that were not enough, we made our eyes into a kind of mirror turned inwards, with the result that they often show without reserve what we are verbally trying to deny.
Jose Saramago
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Death has no need to be cruel, taking people's lives is more than enough.
Jose Saramago
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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
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The attitude of insolent haughtiness is characteristic of the relationships Americans form with what is alien to them, with others.
Jose Saramago
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The virtue of maps, they show what can be done with limited space, they foresee that everything can happen therein.
Jose Saramago
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Blind people do not need a name, I am my voice, nothing else matters.
Jose Saramago
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There is nothing healthier for a man than to walk on his own two legs.
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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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 best way to killing a rose is to force it open when it is still only the promise of a bud.
Jose Saramago