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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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Jose Saramago
Age: 87 †
Born: 1922
Born: November 16
Died: 2010
Died: June 18
Chronicler
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Dramaturge
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
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Translator
Writer
Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico
Jose Saramago
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More quotes by 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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Blind people do not need a name, I am my voice, nothing else matters.
Jose Saramago
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We use words to understand each other and even, sometimes, to find each other.
Jose Saramago
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Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be what they truly are.
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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The difficult thing isn't living with other people, it's understanding them.
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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Whether we like it or not, the one justification for the existence of all religions is death, they need death as much as we need bread to eat.
Jose Saramago
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That it's possible not to see a lie even when it's in front of us.
Jose Saramago
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Sleep is a skilled magician, it changes the proportions of things, the distances between them, it separates people and they're lying next to each other, brings them together and they can barely see one another.
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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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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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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The wise man contents himself with what he has, until such time as he invents something better.
Jose Saramago
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It is economic power that determines political power, and governments become the political functionaries of economic power.
Jose Saramago
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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.
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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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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The only time we can talk about death is while we're alive, not afterwards.
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