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A tree weeps when cut down, a dog howls when beaten, but a man matures when offended.

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
Howl
Offended
Beaten
Dog
Cutting
Tree
Howls
Men
Matures
Weeps

More quotes by Jose Saramago

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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.
Jose Saramago
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Chaos is order yet undeciphered.
Jose Saramago
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This is the effect of panic, a natural effect, you could say that animal nature is like this, plant life would behave in exactly the same way, too, if it did not have all those roots to hold it in the ground, and how nice it would be to see the trees of the forest fleeing the flames.
Jose Saramago
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In the end we discover the only condition for living is to die.
Jose Saramago
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Though I had come into the world on 16 November 1922, my official documents show that I was born two days later, on the 18th. It was thanks to this petty fraud that my family escaped from paying the fine for not having registered my birth at the proper legal time.
Jose Saramago
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Sometimes I say that writing a novel is the same as constructing a chair: a person must be able to sit in it, to be balanced on it. If I can produce a great chair, even better. But above all I have to make sure that it has four stable feet.
Jose Saramago
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We live in a very peculiar world. Democracy isn't discussed, as if it was taken for granted, as if democracy had taken God's place, who is also not discussed.
Jose Saramago
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Look what happened with the employment law in France-the law was withdrawn because the people marched in the streets. I think what we need is a global protest movement of people who won't give up.
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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It is not pornography that is obscene, it is hunger that is obscene.
Jose Saramago
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I am the same person I was before receiving the Nobel Prize. I work with the same regularity, I have not modified my habits, I have the same friends.
Jose Saramago
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When all is said and done, what is clear is that all lives end before their time.
Jose Saramago
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Such is our need to shower blame on some distant entity when it is we who lack the courage to face up to what is there before us.
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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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
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. . . if there is a way for the world to be transformed for the better, it can only be done by pessimism optimists will never change the world for the better.
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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...this is the way fate usually treats us, it's right there behind us, it has already reached out a hand to touch us on the shoulder while we're still muttering to ourselves, It's all over, that's it, who cares anyhow.
Jose Saramago
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...you have to leave the island in order to see the island, that we can't see ourselves unless we become free of ourselves, Unless we escape from ourselves you mean, No, that's not the same thing.
Jose Saramago
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Every second that passes is like a door that opens to allow in what has not yet happened, what we call the future, but, to challenge the contradictory nature of what we have just said, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the future is just an immense void, that the future is just the time on which the eternal present feeds.
Jose Saramago