Jose Saramago Quotes

We never consider that the things dogs know about us are things of which we have not the faintest notion.

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.

As citizens, we all have an obligation to intervene and become involved - it's the citizen who changes things.

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.

The sun appears in one of the upper corners of the rectangle, on the left of anyone looking at the picture.

It is strange how the elderly fall silent when they ought to go on speaking, obliging the young to learn everything from scratch.

The painter paints, the musician makes music, the novelist writes novels. But I believe that we all have some influence, not because of the fact that one is an artist, but because we are citizens.

Writer's make national literature, while translators make universal literature.

just like everything else in life, let time take its course and it will find a solution.

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

Everything in this world can volunteer some reply, what takes up time is posing the questions.

People might ask me, What do you propose instead? I propose nothing. I am a mere novelist, I just write about the world as I see it. It is not my job to transform it. I cannot transform it all by myself, and I wouldn't even know how to. I limit myself to saying what I believe the world to be.

Death has no need to be cruel, taking people's lives is more than enough.

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

Consciences keep silence more often than they should, that's why laws were created.

Just as the habit does not make the monk, the sceptre does not make the king.

I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always cliches, 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.