Quotations
- Divorcing Shua is no problem, the problem is how to divorce myself, and that's impossible.
- People don't choose their dreams, dreams choose people!
- Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be, of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt.
- Words were not given to man in order to conceal his thoughts.
- News is nothing but words, and you can never really tell if words are news.
- Words that come from the heart are never spoken, they get caught in the throat and can only be read in one’s eyes.
- I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always clichés, 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.
- Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.
- I think what we need is a global protest movement of people who won't give up.
- Why did we become blind, I don't know, perhaps one day we'll find out, Do you want me to tell you what I think, Yes, do, I don't think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.
- ...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...
- People live with the illusion that we have a democratic system, but it's only the outward form of one. In reality we live in a plutocracy, a government of the rich.
- Society has to change, but the political powers we have at the moment are not enough to effect this change. The whole democratic system would have to be rethought.
- The world is governed by institutions that are not democratic - the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO.
- What kind of world is this that can send machines to Mars and does nothing to stop the killing of a human being?
José Saramago
(16 November 1922 – 18 June 2010)
José de Sousa Saramago was a Nobel-laureate (1998) Portuguese novelist, poet, playwright and journalist. His works, some of which can be seen as allegories, commonly present subversive perspectives on historic events, emphasizing the human factor.
More than two million copies of his books have been sold in Portugal alone and his work has been translated into 25 languages. He founded the National Front for the Defence of Culture (Lisbon, 1992) with Freitas-Magalhães and others. In 1992, the Portuguese government, under Prime Minister Aníbal Cavaco Silva, ordered the removal of The Gospel According to Jesus Christ from the European Literary Prize's shortlist, claiming the work was religiously offensive. Saramago complained about censorship and moved to Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, Spain, where he resided until his death.
A proponent of libertarian communism, Saramago came into conflict with some groups, such as the Catholic Church. Saramago was an atheist who defended love as an instrument to improve the human condition.
More than two million copies of his books have been sold in Portugal alone and his work has been translated into 25 languages. He founded the National Front for the Defence of Culture (Lisbon, 1992) with Freitas-Magalhães and others. In 1992, the Portuguese government, under Prime Minister Aníbal Cavaco Silva, ordered the removal of The Gospel According to Jesus Christ from the European Literary Prize's shortlist, claiming the work was religiously offensive. Saramago complained about censorship and moved to Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, Spain, where he resided until his death.
A proponent of libertarian communism, Saramago came into conflict with some groups, such as the Catholic Church. Saramago was an atheist who defended love as an instrument to improve the human condition.
