Jose Saramago

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.

I can't imagine myself outside any kind of social or political involvement. Yes, I'm a writer, but I live in this world, and my writing doesn't exist on a separate level. And if people know who I am and read my books, well, good; that way, if I have something more to say, then everyone benefits.

...you have to leave the island in order to see the island, that we can't see ourselves unless we become free of ourselves, Unless we escape from ourselves you mean, No, that's not the same thing.

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.

With the passage of time, as well as the social evolution and genetic exchange, we ended up putting our conscience in the color of our blood and the salt of our tears.

En ningún momento de la historia, en ningún lugar del planeta, las religiones han servido para que los seres humanos se acerquen unos a los otros. Por el contrario, sólo han servido para separar, para quemar, para torturar. No creo en dios, no lo necesito y además soy buena persona.

Every second that passes is like a door that opens to allow in what has not yet happened, what we call the future, but, to challenge the contradictory nature of what we have just said, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the future is just an immense void, that the future is just the time on which the eternal present feeds.

all stories are like those about the creation of the universe, no one was there, no one witnessed anything, yet everyone knows what happened.

Americans have discovered the fragility of life, that ominous fragility that the rest of the world either already experienced or is experiencing now with terrible intensity.

Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered

Unlike Joseph her husband, Mary is neither upright nor pious, but she is not blame for this, the blame lies with the language she speaks if not with the men who invented it, because that language has no feminine form for the words upright and pious.

I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist.

Beginning with adolescence, my political formation was oriented in the ideological direction of Marxism. It was natural, being that my thinking was influenced by an atmosphere of active critical resistance. That was the way it was during all of the dictatorship and up to the Revolution of 1974.

anyone who gets up early by inclination or has been forced to rise early out of necessity finds it intolerable that others should go on sleeping soundly

To continue living, we have to die. That's the story of humanity - generation after generation - that we are going to die. There's nothing dramatic about death except that one loses one's life.

Jeronimo, my grandfather, swine-herder and story-teller, feeling death about to arrive and take him, went and said goodbye to the trees in the yard, one by one, embracing them and crying because he knew he wouldn't see them again. To truly appreciate life we must remember that nothing lasts for ever and take nothing we enjoy for granted. In so doing we stay grateful and happy for all our good fortune.

We are so afraid of the idea of having to die... that we always try to find excuses for the dead, as if we were asking beforehand to be excused when it is our turn.

but it is also true, if this brings her any consolation, that if, before every action, we were to begin weighing up the consequences, thinking about them in earnest, first the immediate consequences, then the probably, then the possible, then the imaginable ones, we should never move beyond the point where our first thought brought us to a halt.

A writer's definitive death is when no one reads his books anymore. That's the final death.

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.

Abstention means you stayed at home or went to the beach. By casting a blank vote, you're saying that you understand your responsibility, you have a political conscience and you came to vote, but you don't agree with any of the existing parties and this is the only way you have of saying so.