Quote

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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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
Like
Incapable
Shadow
Words
Born
Light
Body
Opaque
Human
Explaining
Humans
Shadows

More quotes by Jose Saramago

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I had no books at home. I started to frequent a public library in Lisbon. It was there, with no help except curiosity and the will to learn, that my taste for reading developed and was refined.
Jose Saramago
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Strictly speaking, we do not make decisions. Decisions make us.
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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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.
Jose Saramago
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The wisest man I ever knew in my whole life could not read or write. At four o'clock in the morning, when the promise of a new day still lingered over French lands, he got up from his pallet and left for the fields, taking to pasture the half-dozen pigs whose fertility nourished him and his wife.
Jose Saramago
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No, there are three people in a marriage, there's the woman, there's the man, and there's what I call the third person, the most important, the person who is composed of the man and woman together.
Jose Saramago
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Each part in itself constitutes the whole to which it belongs.
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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...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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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
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As so often happens, the thing left undone tires you most of all, you only feel rested when it has been accomplished.
Jose Saramago
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Death ... doesn't take her eyes off us for a minute, so much so that even those who are not yet due to die feel her gaze pursuing them constantly.
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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Liking is probably the best form of ownership, and ownership the worst form of liking.
Jose Saramago
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Each day is a little bit of history
Jose Saramago
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There is relationship between sight and touch, something about eyes being able to see through the fingers touching the clay, about fingers being able to feel what the eyes are seeing without the fingers actually touching it.
Jose Saramago
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Doesn't anybody understand that killing in the name of God only makes Him a murderer?
Jose Saramago
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The time for miracles has either passed or not come yet, besides, miracles, genuine miracles, whatever people say, are not such a good idea, if it means destroying the very order of things in order to improve them.
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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A tree weeps when cut down, a dog howls when beaten, but a man matures when offended.
Jose Saramago