"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.'"
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Quote collection
Jose Saramago quotes (page 6 of 11)
209 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"From literature to ecology, from the escape velocity of galaxies to the greenhouse effect, from garbage disposal methods to traffic jams, everything is discussed in our world. But the democratic system, as if it were a given fact, untouchable by nature until the end of time, we don't discuss that."
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"I am a person with leftist convictions, and always have been."
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"The attitude of insolent haughtiness is characteristic of the relationships Americans form with what is alien to them, with others."
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"Creating is always so much more stimulating than destroying."
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"That is the dream of all novelists-that one of their characters will become 'somebody.'"
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"In a king, modesty would be a sign of weakness."
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"Consciences keep silence more often than they should, that's why laws were created."
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"all stories are like those about the creation of the universe, no one was there, no one witnessed anything, yet everyone knows what happened."
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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."
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"Today's bread does not eliminate yesterday's hunger, much less that of tomorrow."
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"The only time we can talk about death is while we're alive, not afterwards."
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"Every novel is like this, desperation, a frustrated attempt to save something of the past. Except that it still has not been established whether it is the novel that prevents man from forgetting himself or the impossibility of forgetfulness that makes him write novels."
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"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."
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"When I am occupied with a work that requires continuity - a novel, for example - I write every day."
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"We say Fine, even though we may be dying, and this is commonly known as taking one's courage in both hands, a phenomenon that has only been observed in the human species."
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"The much-quoted immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary occurred but once so that the world might know that Almighty God, when He so chooses, has no need of men, though He cannot dispense with women."
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"We know that happiness is short-lived, that we fail to cherish it when it is within our grasp and value it only when it has vanished forever."
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"The world had already changed before September 11. The world has been going through a process of change over the last 20 or 30 years. A civilization ends, another one begins."
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"I was born in a family of landless peasants, in Azinhaga, a small village in the province of Ribatejo, on the right bank of the Almonda River, around a hundred kilometres north-east of Lisbon."
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