The Cave

by José Saramago

It is true what people say, the young have the ability, but lack the wisdom, and the old have the wisdom, but lack the ability.

when we think that everything has been taken away from us, only to notice later that something does, in fact, still remain,

he tried to pour oil on the troubled waters that he himself had churned up,

we would know far more about life’s complexities if we applied ourselves to the close study of its contradictions instead of wasting so much time on similarities and connections, which should, anyway, be self-explanatory.

we confidently say that it’s not worth trying to reach any conclusions merely because we decide to stop halfway along the path that would lead us straight to them.

The wine has been poured and we must drink it,

the game of give and take which is what married life almost always comes down to,

Life is like that, full of words that are not worth saying or that were worth saying once but not any more, each word that we utter will take up the space of another more deserving word, not deserving in its own right, but because of the possible consequences of saying it.

studying his open palms, as if looking for a route in those lines and crossroads, either the shortest or the longest, generally speaking, choosing one or the other depends on how much or how little of a rush you are in, not forgetting, of course, those cases when someone or something is pushing you from behind, and you don’t know why or where they are pushing you.

there’s no interest any more in earthenware crockery, that no one wants it, and therefore we too are no longer needed, we are a cracked bowl which there is no point in clamping together,

the important thing is the road you walked, the journey you made,

the instantaneous speed of thought, which heads off in a straight line even when it seems to us to have lost its way, because what we fail to realize is that, as it races off in one direction, it is in fact advancing in all directions at once,

from one foot to lift the other foot, and even then it is always stumbling, hesitating and dithering over an adjective or a verb that turns up unannounced by its subject,

The days are all the same, it’s the hours that are different, when a day comes to an end it always does so with its twenty-four hours all present and correct, even when those hours contained nothing,

this man has lived long enough to know that the weather is always there, sunny, as today promises to be, or rainy, as it was yesterday, indeed, when we open the window and raise our nose to the air above, it is merely to find out if the weather is doing what we want it to do.

I’m too old for hopes, Marçal, I need certainties, immediate certainties, ones that don’t pin their hopes on a tomorrow that might not even be mine,

Where do we begin, he asked, Where you always have to begin, at the beginning,

These are the delusions of the pure and the 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.

Fortunately for me, you’re capable of thinking quickly, thinking a lot and thinking well all at the same time,

some people spend their entire lives reading but never get beyond reading the words on the page, they don’t understand that the words are merely stepping stones placed across a fast-flowing river, and the reason they’re there is so that we can reach the farther shore, it’s the other side that matters, Unless, Unless what, Unless those rivers don’t have just two shores but many, unless each reader is his or her own shore, and that shore is the only shore worth reaching,