José Saramago

“... le risposte non vengono ogniqualvolta sono necessarie, come del resto succede spesse volte che il rimanere semplicemente ad aspettarle sia l'unica risposta possibile”

“Desde o princípio que nós não temos feito outra cousa que contradizer as realidade, e aqui estamos, Que irá dizer o papa, Se eu o fosse, perdoe-me deus a estulta vaidade de pensar-me tal, mandaria pôr imediatamente em circulação uma nova tese, a da morte adiada, Sem mais explicações, A igreja nunca se lhe pediu que explicasse fosse o que fosse, a nossa outra especialidade, além da balística, te sido neutralizar, pela fé, o espírito curioso”

“As mãos são dois livros abertos, não pelas razões, supostas ou autênticas, da quiromancia, com as suas linhas do coração e da vida, da vida, meus senhores, ouviram bem, da vida, mas porque falam quando se abrem ou se fecham, quando acariciam ou golpeiam, quando enxugam uma lágrima ou disfarçam um sorriso, quando se pousam sobre um ombro ou acenam um adeus, quando trabalham, quando estão quietas, quando dormem, quando despertam.”

“naqueles cinquenta e oito segundos de música uma transpiração rítmica e melódica de qualquer vida humana, corrente ou extraordinária, pela sua trágica brevidade, pela sua intensidade desesperada, e também por causa daquele acorde final que era como um ponto em suspensão deixado no ar, no vago, em qualquer parte, como se, irremediavelmente, alguma cousa ainda tivesse ficado por dizer”

“Forgive me if what has seemed little to you, to me is all.”

“Everything is argued over in this world. Apart from only one thing that is not argued over. Nobody argues about democracy. Democracy is there as if it was some sort of saint in the altar from whom miracles are no longer expected. But it’s there as a reference. A reference. Democracy. And no-one attends to the matter that the democracy in which we live is a democracy taken captive, conditioned, amputated. Because the power..the power of the citizen, the power of each one of us, is limited, in the political sphere, I repeat, in the political sphere, to remove a government that we do not like and replace it with another one that perhaps we might like in the future. Nothing else. But the big decisions are taken in a different sphere, and we all know which one that is. The big international financial organisations, the IMFs, the World Trade Organisations, the World Banks, the OECDs. All..not one of these entities is democratic. And so, how can we keep talking about democracy, if those who effectively govern the world are not chosen democratically by the people? Who chooses the representatives of each country in those organisations? Your respective peoples? No. Where then is the democracy?”

“If shame still has any meaning in this hell we're expected to live...it is thanks to that person who had the courage to go and kill,... Agreed, but shame won't fill our plates,... You're right in what you say, there have always been those who have filled their bellies because they had no sense of shame.”

“The history of mankind is the history of our misunderstandings with god, for he doesn't understand us, and we don't understand him.”

“... anche nei mali peggiori è possibile trovare una porzione di bene sufficiente a sopportarli, i mali, con pazienza ....”

“It was said that one of them, either the actor or the history teacher, was superfluous in this world, but you weren't, you weren't superfluous, there is no duplicate of you to come and replace you at your mother's side, you were unique, just as every ordinary person is unique, truly unique.”

“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.”

“The difficult thing isn't living with other people, it's understanding them.”

“Baltasar Mateus, o Sete-Sóis, está calado, apenas olha fixamente Blimunda, e de cada vez que ela o olha a ele sente um aperto na boca do estômago, porque olhos como estes nunca se viram, claros de cinzento, ou verde, ou azul, que com a luz de fora variam ou o pensamento de dentro, e às vezes tornam-se negros noturnos ou brancos brilhantes como lasca de carvão de pedra.”

“If we cannot live entirely like human beings, at least let us do everything in our power not to live entirely like animals.”

“La derrota tiene algo positivo, nunca es definitiva. En cambio la victoria tiene algo negativo, jamás es definitiva.”

“[...] death never replies, not because she doesn't want to, but because she doesn't know what to say in the face of the greatest of human sorrows.”

“It was my fault, she sobbed, and it was true, no one could deny it, but it is also true, if this brings her any consolation, that if, before every action, we were to begin by weighing up the consequences, thinking about them in earnest, first the immediate consequences, then the probable, then the possible, then the imaginable ones, we should never move beyond the point where our first thought brought us to a halt”

“Don't be afraid, the darkness you're in is no greater than the darkness inside your own body, they are two darknesses separated by a skin, I bet you've never thought of that, you carry a darkness about with you all the time and that doesn't frighten you...my dear chap, you have to learn to live with the darkness outside just as you learned to live with the darkness inside”

“News of the miracle had reached the doge's palace, but in a somewhat garbled form. the result of the successive transmissions of facts, true or assumed, real or purely imaginary, based on everything from partial, more or less eyewitness accounts to reports from those who simply liked the sound of their own voice, for, as we know all too well, no one telling a story can resist adding a period, and sometimes even a comma.”

“i buoni e i cattivi risultati delle nostre parole e delle nostre azioni si vanno distribuendo, presumibilmente in modo alquanto uniforme ed equilibrato, in tutti i giorni del futuro, compresi quelli, infiniti, in cui non saremo più qui per poterlo confermare, per congratularci o chiedere perdono”

“... se prima di ogni atto ci mettessimo a considerarne tutte le conseguenze, a considerarle seriamente, anzitutto quelle immediate, poi le probabili, poi le possibili, poi le immaginabili, non arriveremmo neanche a muoverci dal punto in cui ci avrebbe fatto fermare il primo pensiero.”

“As my cat would say, all hours are good for sleeping.”

“It is an unwavering rule for those in power that, when it comes to heads, it is best to cut them off before they start thinking, afterwards, it might be too late.”

“Casting a ballot is your irrevocable right, and no one will ever deny you that right, but just as you tell children not to play with matches, so we warn whole peoples of the dangers of playing with dynamite.”

“We have an odd relationship with words. We learn a few when we are small, throughout our lives we collect others through education, conversation, our contact with books, and yet, in comparison, there are only a tiny number about whose meaning, sense, and denotation we would have absolutely no doubts, if one day, we were to ask ourselves seriously what they meant. Thus we affirm and deny, thus we convince and are convinced, thus we argue, deduce, and conclude, wandering fearlessly over the surface of concepts about which we only have the vaguest of ideas, and, despite the false air of confidence that we generally affect as we feel our way along the road in verbal darkness, we manage, more or less, to understand each other and even, sometimes, to find each other.”

“Las combinaciones y las composiciones de las casualidades, siendo efectivamente muchísimas, no son infinitas, y más vale que nos arriesguemos a subir a la higuera para intentar alcanzar el higo que tumbarnos bajo su sombra y esperar a que nos caiga en la boca.”

“Porque foi que cegámos, Não sei, talvez um dia se chegue a conhecer a razão, Queres que te diga o que penso, Diz, Penso que não cegámos, penso que estamos cegos, Cegos que vêm, Cegos que, vendo, não vêm”

“Ni la juventud sabe lo que puede, ni la vejez puede lo que sabe.”

“A cegueira também é isto, viver num mundo onde se tenha acabado a esperança.”

“Só quero dizer que aquilo que cada um de nós tiver de ser na vida, não o será pelas palavras que ouve nem pelos conselhos que recebe. Teremos de receber na própria carne a cicatriz que nos transforma em verdadeiros homens.”

“Se sou pessimista é porque o mundo é péssimo, só isso.”

“[...] with the protecting sky in all its splendour and the golden sun blazing forth against a backdrop of crystalline blue, to use the inspired words of a television reporter[...].”

“İşler böyle olduğunda, yani Tanrı imdada yetişecekmiş gibi görünmüyorsa, insanın tek yapabileceği onun yerini almaya çalışmaktır, evi barkı terkedip, aslında bizden çok Tanrı’nın malı olan şu zavallı yaşlı dünyamıza çekidüzen vermeye çabalamak...”

“Ey Tanrım, ne zaman insanoğlunun karşısına çıkıp kendi hatalarını itiraf edeceksin?”

“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.”

“--I don’t quite grasp your meaning.--Just as I don’t quite understand what I am saying. But back to the point….”

“O drama não é que as pessoas tenham opiniões, mas sim que as tenham sem saber do que falam.”

“Se tens um coração de ferro, bom proveito. O meu, fizeram-no de carne, e sangra todo o dia.”

“When all is said and done, what is clear is that all lives end before their time.”

“Pobres tus padres, pobre tú, cuando os encontréis, ciegos de ojos, ciegos de sentimientos, porque los sentimientos con que hemos vivido y que nos hicieron vivir como éramos, nacieron de los ojos que teníamos, sin ojos serán diferentes los sentimientos, no sabemos cómo, no sabemos cuáles, tú dices que estamos muertos porque estamos ciegos, ahí está.”

“Só num mundo de cegos as coisas serão o que verdadeiramente são.”

“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.”

“Dentro de nós há uma coisa que não tem nome, essa coisa é o que somos".”

“Contrary to what most people think, making a decision is one of the easiest decisions in the world, as is more than proved by the fact that we make decision upon decision throughout the day, there, however, we run straight into the heart of the matter, for these decisions always come to us afterward with their particular little problems, or, to make ourselves quite clear, with their rough edges needing to be smoothed, the first of these problems being our capacity for sticking to a decision and the second our willingness to follow it through.”

“...sometimes we ask ourselves why happiness took so long to arrive, why it didn't come sooner, but appears suddenly, as now, when we've given up hope of it ever arriving, it's likely then that we won't know what to do, and rather than it being a question of choosing between laughter and tears, we will be filled by a secret anxiety to which we might not know how to respond at all.”

“...sometimes I do actually forget that the person to whom I owe that love is a real person, complete in himself, not someone who should make do with some rather diffuse emotion which gradually resigns itself to its own fatal vagueness, as if that were a fate against which there were no possible appeal...”

“...in matters of feeling and of the heart, too much is always better than too little.”

“Say to a blind man, you’re free, open the door that was separating him from the world, Go, you are free, we tell him once more, and he does not go, he has remained motionless there in the middle of the road, he and the others, they are terrified, they do not know where to go, the fact is that there is no comparison between living in a rational labyrinth, which is, by definition, a mental asylum and venturing forth, without a guiding hand or a dog-leash, into the demented labyrinth of the city, where memory will serve no purpose, for it will merely be able to recall the images of places but not the paths whereby we might get there.”

“Lei è sempre stata più sicura di me, pensava, e in quel momento vide distintamente le cause della sua sconfitta, la figuraccia che faceva spettinato e con la barba lunga, le pantofole scalcagnate, le pieghe dei pantaloni del pigiama che sembravano frange avvizzite, la vestaglia mezza su mezza giù, ci sono decisioni nella vita che, per prenderle, è consigliabile esser vestiti come per uscire, con la cravatta e le scarpe lucide, questo significa essere un signore, esclamare in tono offeso, Se la mia presenza la disturba, signora, non ho bisogno che me lo dica, e all’istante si imbocca la porta, senza guardarsi indietro, guardarsi indietro è un rischio tremendo, ci si può anche trasformare in una statua di sale e restare lì alla mercé della prima pioggia.”

“Algunas personas usan coraza, otras misterios”