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We are so afraid of the idea of having to die... that we always try to find excuses for the dead, as if we were asking beforehand to be excused when it is our turn.

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
Idea
Excuses
Ideas
Excuse
Asking
Find
Afraid
Trying
Dead
Always
Turn
Dies
Excused
Turns
Beforehand

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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.
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Nothing so tires a person as having to struggle, not with himself, but with an abstraction.
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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.
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It is economic power that determines political power, and governments become the political functionaries of economic power.
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We use words to understand each other and even, sometimes, to find each other.
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Dignity has no price ... when someone starts making small concessions, in the end life loses all meaning.
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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.
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You know the name you were given, you do not know the name that you have
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I was a good pupil at primary school: in the second class I was writing with no spelling mistakes, and the third and fourth classes were done in a single year.
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That is the dream of all novelists-that one of their characters will become 'somebody.'
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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.
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A stomach accustomed to hunger is satisfied with very little.
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I can't imagine myself outside any kind of social or political involvement. Yes, I'm a writer, but I live in this world, and my writing doesn't exist on a separate level. And if people know who I am and read my books, well, good that way, if I have something more to say, then everyone benefits.
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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.
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Life is like that, full of words that are not worth saying or that were worth saying once but not any more, each word that we utter will take up the space of another more deserving word, not deserving in its own right, but because of the possible consequences of saying it.
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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.
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There are those who deny me the right to speak of God, because I am not a believer. And I say that I have every right in the world. I want to talk about God because it is a problem that affects all humanity.
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