José Saramago Quotes

The day before is what we bring to the day we’re actually living through, life is a matter of carrying along all those days-before just as someone might carry stones, and when we can no longer cope with the load, the work is done, the last day is the only one that is not the day before another day.

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.

If you don’t write your books, nobody else will do it for you. No one else has lived your life.

I am a person with leftist convictions, and always have been.

…we confidently say that it’s not worth trying to reach any conclusions merely because we decide to stop halfway along the path that would lead us straight to them.

A stomach accustomed to hunger is satisfied with very little.

If I could repeat my childhood, I would repeat it exactly as it was, with the poverty, the cold, little food, with the flies and pigs, all that.

In the end we discover the only condition for living is to die.

No human being can achieve all he or she desires in this life except in dreams, so good night all.

Words have their own hierarchy, their own protocol, their own artistic titles, their own plebeian stigmas.

When we are born, when we enter this world, it is as if we signed a pact for the rest of our life, but a day may come when we will ask ourselves Who signed this on my behalf?

We can escape from everything, but not from ourselves.