Quotes by José Saramago

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.

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.

Because each of you has his or her own death, you carry it with you in a secret place from the moment youre born, it belongs to you and you belong to it.

The church has never been asked to explain anything, our speciality, along with ballistics, has always been the neutralisation of the overly curious mind through faith.

... we are only ever pretending to ourselves, never to other people ...

However hard he tried, he could never manage to make himself visible to human eyes and not because he cant, since for him nothing is impossible, its simply that he wouldnt know what face to wear when introducing himself to the beings he supposedly created and who probably wouldnt recognize him anyway. There are those who say were very fortunate that god chooses not to appear before us, because compared with the shock we would get were such a thing to happen, our fear of death would be mere childs play. Besides, all the many things that have been said about god and about death are nothing but stories, and this is just another one.

Authoritarian, paralyzing, circular, occasionally elliptical stock phrases, also jocularly referred to as nuggets of wisdom, are a malignant plague, one of the very worst ever to ravage the earth.

There are people like Senhor José everywhere, who fill their time, or what they believe to be their spare time, by collecting stamps, coins, medals, vases, postcards, matchboxes, books, clocks, sport shirts, autographs, stones, clay figurines, empty beverage cans, little angels, cacti, opera programmes, lighters, pens, owls, music boxes, bottles, bonsai trees, paintings, mugs, pipes, glass obelisks, ceramic ducks, old toys, carnival masks, and they probably do so out of something that we might call metaphysical angst, perhaps because they cannot bear the idea of chaos being the one ruler of the universe, which is why, using their limited powers and with no divine help, they attempt to impose some order on the world, and for a short while they manage it, but only as long as they are there to defend their collection, because when the day comes when it must be dispersed, and that day always comes, either with their death or when the collector grows weary, everything goes back to its beginnings, everything returns to chaos.

a man was on his way to the gallows when he met another, who asked him: where are you going, my friend? and the condemned man replied: im not going anywhere. theyre taking me by force.

En su habitación del hotel la muerte, desnuda, está delante del espejo. No sabe quién es.

Even death, faced with the option of death or life, she would choose life.

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.

blindness is a private matter between a person and the eyes with which he or she was born.

Assim é, mas a vantagem da igreja é que, embora às vezes o não pareça, ao gerir o que está no alto, governa o que está em baixo.

... the best way of killing a rose is to force it open when it is still only the promise of a bud.

... time is a master of ceremonies who always ends up putting us in our rightful place, we advance, stop, and retreat according to his orders, our mistake lies in imagining that we can catch him out.

You never know beforehand what people are capable of, you have to wait, give it time, its time that rules, time is our gambling partner on the other side of the table and it holds all the cards of the deck in its hand, we have to guess the winning cards of life, our lives.

In a matter of a moment the amount of sand in the upper part of the hour-glass had dwindled dramatically, the tiny grains were rushing through the opening, each grain more eager to leave then the last, time is just like people, sometimes it’s all it can do to drag itself along, but at others, it runs like a deer and leaps like a young goat, which, when you think about it, is not saying much, since the cheetah is the fastest of all the animals, and yet it has never occurred to anyone to say of another person He runs and jumps like a cheetah, perhaps because that first comparison comes from the magical late middle ages, when gentlemen went deer-hunting and no one had ever seen a cheetah running or even heard of its existence. Languages are conservative, they always carry their archives with them and hate having to be updated.

The worst pain ... isnt the pain you feel at the time, its the pain you feel later on when theres nothing you can do about it, They say that time heals all wounds, But we never live long enough to test that theory ...

Reading is probably another way of being in a place.