José Saramago citáty

„Když srdce nic necítí, tak to, co říkají ústa, sice není lež, ale je to, jako kdyby neřekla nic.“

—  José Saramago

„Kdybych umřel v 60, nic bych nenapsal.“

—  José Saramago

Originál: (en) I had died when I was 60, I would have written nothing.
Zdroj: [Hopkinson, Amanda, José Saramago obituary, guardian.co.uk, 2010-06-18, 2010-06-19, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jun/18/jose-saramago-obituary]

„Člověk nikdy nemůže být vším a ještě méně ničím.“

—  José Saramago

„Obrazy vidí očima, které se na ně dívají.“

—  José Saramago

„God is the silence of the universe, and man is the cry that gives meaning to that silence.“

—  José Saramago

Deus é o silêncio do universo, e o homem o grito que dá um sentido a esse silêncio.
Lanzarote Notebooks (1990), quoted in The Notebook, entry for 9 October 2008.

„Besides the conversation of women, it is dreams that keep the world in orbit.“

—  José Saramago, kniha Baltasar and Blimunda

p. 107
Baltasar and Blimunda (1982)
Kontext: Besides the conversation of women, it is dreams that keep the world in orbit. But dreams also form a diadem of moons, therefore the sky is that splendour inside a man's head, if his head is not, in fact, his own unique sky.

„Men, forgive Him, for He knows not what He has done.“

—  José Saramago, kniha The Gospel According to Jesus Christ

p. 347; Jesus' last words from the cross.
The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991)
Kontext: Jesus then realized he had been brought here under false pretences, as the lamb is led to sacrifice and that his life had been planned for death since the very beginning. Remembering the river of blood and suffering that would flow from his side and flood the entire earth, he called out to the open sky where God could be seen smiling, Men, forgive Him, for He knows not what He has done.

„I was reading even before I could spell properly, even though I couldn't necessarily understand what I was reading. Being able to identify a word I knew was like finding a signpost on the road telling me I was on the right path, heading in the right direction. And so it was, in this rather unusual way, Diário by Diário, month by month, pretending not to hear the jokey comments made by the adults in the house, who were amused by the way I would stare at the newspaper as if at a wall, that my moment to astonish them finally came, when, one day, nervous but triumphant, I read out loud, in one go, without hesitation, several consecutive lines of print.“

—  José Saramago

Mal sabendo ainda soletrar, já lia, sem perceber que estava lendo. Identificar na escrita do jornal uma palavra que eu conhecesse era como encontrar um marco na estrada a dizer-me que ia bem, que seguia na boa direcção. E foi assim, desta maneira algo invulgar, Diário após Diário, mês após mês, fazendo de conta que não ouvia as piadas dos adultos da casa, que se divertiam por estar eu a olhar para o jornal como se fosse um muro, que a minha hora de os deixar sem fala chegou, quando, um dia, de um fôlego, li em voz alta, sem titubear, nervoso mas triunfante, umas quantas linhas seguidas.
pp. 87–88
Small Memories (2006)

„Let's be guided by norms based on consensus and authority obvious as it is that any variation in the authority varies the consensus, You give no leeway, Because there can be no leeway, we live cooped up in a room and paint the world and the universe on its walls.“

—  José Saramago

Orientamo-nos por normas geradas segundo consensos, e domínios, mete-se pelos olhos dentro que variando o domínio varia o consenso, Não deixas saída, Porque não há saída, vivemos num quarto fechados e pintamos o mundo e o universo nas paredes dele.
p. 267
The History of the Siege of Lisbon (1989)

„If I'm sincere today, what does it matter if I regret it tomorrow?“

—  José Saramago, kniha Blindness

p. 290
Blindness (1995)

„One might ask why Senhor José needs a hundred-yard-long piece of string if the length of the Central Registry, despite successive extensions, is no more than eighty. That is the question of a person who imagines that one can do everything in life simply by following a straight line, that it is always possible to proceed from one place to another by the shortest route, perhaps some people in the outside world believe that they have done so, but here, where the living and the dead share the same space, sometimes, in order to find one of them, you have to make a lot of twists and turns, you have to skirt round mountains of bundles, columns of files, piles of cards, thickets of ancient remains, you have to walk down dark gulleys, between walls of grubby paper which, up above, actually touch, yards and yards of string will have to be unravelled, left behind, like a sinuous, subtle trail traced in the dust, there is no other way of knowing where you have to go next, there is no other way of finding your way back.“

—  José Saramago, kniha All the Names

pp. 140–141
All the Names (1997)

„The question suddenly came into my head, 'And if we were all blind?' And then immediately, as if answering myself, 'But we are all blind.“

—  José Saramago, kniha Blindness

Um dia, sentado à mesa, pensei: E se fôssemos todos cegos? Imediatamente me veio a resposta: Nós somos todos cegos.
On the idea for his next novel (Blindness), which came to him while sitting in a restaurant; New York Times interview with Alan Riding (1998), as quoted in Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies, 6th Edition (Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture, 2001), p. 131.

„Encyclopedias are like immutable cycloramas, prodigious projectors whose reels have got stuck and which show, with a kind of maniacal fixity, a landscape which, because it is condemned to be only and for all eternity what it was, will at the same time grow older more decrepit and more unnecessary. The encyclopedia purchased by Cipriano Algor's father is magnificent and as useless as a line of poetry we cannot quite remember.“

—  José Saramago, kniha The Cave

p. 57 (Vintage 2003)
The Cave (2000)

„Everything is discussed in this world, except for one thing: democracy. Democracy is not discussed. Democracy is there, as a kind of saint, from whom no miracles are expected, but that is there as a reference: "the democracy"; and we don’t notice that the democracy in which we live in is a kidnapped, conditioned and amputated one, because 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 removing a government that we don’t like and replacing it by another one that we might come to like. Nothing else. But the important decisions are made in another sphere, and we all know which one it is. The great international financial organizations, the IMFs, the World Trade Organizations, the World Banks, the OECD, all of these… None of these institutions is democratic, so how can we continue to talk about democracy, if those who actually govern the world are not democratically elected by the people? Who chooses the countries' representatives in those institutions? Their respective peoples? No. So where is the democracy?“

—  José Saramago

Conference http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aWFQRcdChk at Fórum Social Mundial, December 2007.

„Age carries with it a double load of guilt“

—  José Saramago, kniha The Cave

p. 69 (Vintage 2003)
The Cave (2000)

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

—  José Saramago, kniha The Cave

p. 89 (Vintage 2003)
The Cave (2000)

„Authoritarian, paralyzing, circular, occasionally elliptical, stock phrases, also jocularly referred to as nuggets of wisdom, are malignant plague, one of the very worst ever to ravage the earth. We say to the confused, Know thyself, as if knowing yourself was not the fifth and most difficult of human arithmetical operations, we say to the apathetic, Where there’s a will, there’s a way, as if the brute realities of the world did not amuse themselves each day by turning that phrase on its head, we say to the indecisive, Begin at the beginning, as if that beginning were the clearly visible point of a loosely wound thread and that all we had to do was to keep pulling until we reached the other end, and as if, between the former and the latter, we had held in our hands a smooth, continuous thread with no knots to untie, no snarled to untangle, a complete impossibility in the life of a skien, or indeed, if we may be permitted on more stock phrase, in the skien of life. … These are the delusions of the pure and unprepared, the beginning is never the clear, precise end of a thread, the beginning is a long, painfully slow process that requires time and patience in order to find out in which direction it is heading, a process that feels its way along the path ahead like a blind man the beginning is just the beginning, what came before is nigh on worthless.“

—  José Saramago, kniha The Cave

p. 54 (Vintage 2003)
The Cave (2000)

„… because contrary to what people say, two weaknesses don't make for a still greater weakness, but for renewed strength …“

—  José Saramago, kniha The Cave

The Cave (2000)

„As I could not and did not aspire to venture beyond my little plot of cultivated land, all I had left was the possibility of digging down, underneath, towards the roots. My own but also the world's, if I can be allowed such an immoderate ambition.“

—  José Saramago

Nobel Lecture (1998)