José Saramago citáty

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

—  José Saramago

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

—  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]

„So often we need a whole lifetime in order to change our life, we think a great deal, weigh things up and vacillate, then we go back to the beginning, we think and think, we displace ourselves on the tracks of time with a circular movement, like those clouds of dust, dead leaves, debris, that have no strength for anything more, better by far that we should live in a land of hurricanes.“

—  José Saramago, kniha The Stone Raft

The Stone Raft (1994)

„Each part in itself constitutes the whole to which it belongs.“

—  José Saramago, kniha The Cave

Zdroj: The Cave (2000), p. 68 (Vintage 2003)

„There is relationship between sight and touch, something about eyes being able to see through the fingers touching the clay, about fingers being able to feel what the eyes are seeing without the fingers actually touching it.“

—  José Saramago, kniha The Cave

Zdroj: The Cave (2000), p. 20 (Vintage 2003)

„Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.“

—  José Saramago, kniha Blindness

Dentro de nós há uma coisa que não tem nome, essa coisa é o que somos.
Zdroj: Blindness (1995), p. 276

„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

Zdroj: Baltasar and Blimunda (1982), p. 107
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

Zdroj: The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991), p. 347; Jesus' last words from the cross.
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.

„Nobody performs her or his duties. Governments do not, because they do not know, they are not able or they do not wish, or because they are not permitted by those who effectively govern the world: The multinational and pluricontinental companies whose power — absolutely non-democratic — reduce to next to nothing what is left of the ideal of democracy. We citizens are not fulfilling our duties either. Let us think that no human rights will exist without symmetry of the duties that correspond to them. It is not to be expected that governments in the next 50 years will do it. Let us common citizens therefore speak up. With the same vehemence as when we demanded our rights, let us demand responsibility over our duties. Perhaps the world could turn a little better.“

—  José Saramago

Nobel Banquet Speech

„This Jerónimo, my grandfather, swineherd 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.“

—  José Saramago

Nobel Lecture (1998)

„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

Zdroj: All the Names (1997), pp. 140–141

„Ah, who will write the history of what might have been?“

—  José Saramago

Fernando Pessoa (as Álvaro de Campos), quoted by José Saramago in The Stone Raft (1986), p. 9
Misattributed

„I was already at the twentieth section of the book and not very happy with it, when I realised how it could be written. I saw that I would only be able to write it if I did so as if I were actually telling the story. That could not be done by putting so-called oral language into writing, because that's impossible, but by introducing into my writing a mechanism of apparent spontaneity, apparent digression and apparent disorganisation in the discourse. I say 'apparent' since I am only too aware of how much work it took to ensure that it turned out like that.“

—  José Saramago

...eu já estava na vigésima parte do livro, triste, quando senti que o livro podia ser escrito. Percebi que só seria capaz de escrevê-lo se o fizesse como se contasse. Não passando para a escrita o chamado discurso oral, porque isso é impossível, mas introduzindo na escrita um me-canismo de aparente prolixidade, aparente desor-ganização do discurso. Digo aparente porque sei o trabalho que me deu fazer de conta que era tudo assim.
Interview in Idéias, no. 107 (15 October 1988), trans. Margaret Jull Costa.

„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.“

—  José Saramago

Todo o romance é isso, desespero, intento frustrado de que o passado não seja coisa definitivamente perdida. Só não se acabou ainda de averiguar se é o romance que impede o homem de esquecer-se ou se é a impossibilidade do esquecimento que o leva a escrever romances.
Zdroj: The History of the Siege of Lisbon (1989), p. 47

„I write to try to understand, and because I have nothing better to do.“

—  José Saramago

"Efe" report, in Arrecife de Lanzarote (Spain), "Saramago diz que escreve por não ter 'nada melhor para fazer'", published in Folha de São Paulo http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/ilustrada/ult90u68178.shtml, 2007.

„Sometimes I say that writing a novel is the same as constructing a chair: a person must be able to sit in it, to be balanced on it. If I can produce a great chair, even better. But above all I have to make sure that it has four stable feet.“

—  José Saramago

Interview with Katherine Vaz, José Saramago http://bombsite.com/issues/999/articles/3565, BOMB Magazine, June 2001.

„The wisest man I ever knew in my whole life could not read or write. At four o'clock in the morning, when the promise of a new day still lingered over French lands, he got up from his pallet and left for the fields, taking to pasture the half-dozen pigs whose fertility nourished him and his wife…“

—  José Saramago

Referring to his grandfather, Jerónimo Meirinho.
Nobel Lecture (1998)