José Saramago citáty
José Saramago
Datum narození: 16. listopad 1922
Datum úmrtí: 18. červen 2010
José de Sousa Saramago byl portugalský spisovatel, dramatik a novinář; dosud je jediným portugalským nositelem Nobelovy ceny za literaturu.
Citáty José Saramago
„Kdybych umřel v 60, nic bych nenapsal.“
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.“
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.
„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.
„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.
„If we cannot live entirely like human beings, at least let us do everything in our power not to live entirely like animals.“
— José Saramago, kniha Blindness
Se não formos capazes de viver inteiramente como pessoas, ao menos façamos tudo para não viver inteiramente como animais.
Zdroj: Blindness (1995), p. 116
„The only time we can talk about death is while we’re alive, not afterwards.“
— José Saramago, kniha The Cave
Zdroj: The Cave (2000), p. 22 (Vintage 2003)
„Fate [is] the supreme order to which even gods are subject. And what of men, what is their function. To challenge order, to change fate. For the better. For better or for worse, it makes no difference, the point is to keep fate from being fate.“
— José Saramago, kniha The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
O destino é a ordem suprema, a que os próprios deuses aspiram, E os homens, que papel vem a ser o dos homens, Perturbar a ordem, corrigir o destino, Para melhor, Para melhor ou para pior, tanto faz, o que é preciso é impedir que o destino seja destino.
Zdroj: The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1993), p. 288
„Lord knows why they depict death with wings when death is everywhere.“
— José Saramago, kniha The Cave
Zdroj: The Cave (2000), p. 112 (Vintage 2003)
„The man changed position, turned his back on the wardrobe blocking the door and let his right arm slide down toward the side on which the dog is lying. A minute later, he was awake. He was thirsty. He turned on his bedside light, got up, shuffled his feet into the slippers which were, as always, providing a pillow for the dog's head, and went into the kitchen. Death followed him. The man filled a glass with water and drank it. At this point, the dog appeared, slaked his thirst in the water-dish next to the back door and then looked up at his master. I suppose you want to go out, said the cellist. He opened the door and waited until the animal came back. A little water remained in his glass. Death looked at it and made an effort to imagine what it must be like to feel thirsty, but failed. She would have been equally incapable of imagining it when she'd had to make people die of thirst in the desert, but at the time she hadn't even tried. The dog returned, wagging his tail. Let's go back to sleep, said the man. They went into the bedroom again, the dog turned around twice, then curled up into a ball. The man drew the sheet up to his neck, coughed twice and soon afterward was asleep again. Sitting in her corner, death was watching. Much later, the dog got up from the carpet and jumped onto the sofa. For the first time in her life, death knew what it felt like to have a dog on her lap.“
— José Saramago, kniha Death with Interruptions
Zdroj: Death with Interruptions (2005), p. 172
„How are you, doctor, that is what we say when we do not wish to play the weakling, 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.“
— José Saramago, kniha Blindness
Zdroj: Blindness (1995), p. 32
„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
Zdroj: The Cave (2000), p. 54 (Vintage 2003)
„It is not pornography that is obscene, it is hunger that is obscene.“
Não é a pornografia que é obscena, é a fome que é obscena
Interview http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuohB_arwRE&lr=1 Programa Jô Soares, 1997.