The Collected Novels of José Saramago

by José Saramago

It never occurs to people that the one who finishes something is never the one who started it, even if both have the same name, for the name is the only thing that remains constant.

How typical of newspapers, all they can talk about is what has already happened and nearly always when it is much too late to rectify mistakes, prevent shortages, or avert disasters.

It is a miracle that men do not lose their sanity each time they open their mouths to speak.

Inside the body, too, there is profound darkness, yet the blood reaches the heart, the brain is sightless yet can see, it is deaf yet hears, it has no hands yet reaches out. Clearly man is trapped in his own labyrinth.

Only a different reality, whatever it is, may be substituted for the reality one wishes to convey. The difference between them mutually demonstrates, explains, and measures them, reality as the invention it was, invention as the reality it will be.

People struggle for what they believe to be their values but what may be merely emotions momentarily aroused.

I am alive, he murmured, then in a loud, sonorous voice he repeated, I am alive, and since there was no one there to contradict him, he was convinced. He put on his hat and went out.

Always hold on to what is useless, you will always find a use for it.

Liking is probably the best form of ownership, and ownership the worst form of liking.

Now, returning to the home that we have made into our observation post, we should say that, contrary to one's natural expectations, not a single listener or viewer noticed that none of these usual forms of address issued from the president's mouth, neither this, that or the other, perhaps because the plangent drama of the first words tossed into the ether, I speak to you with my heart in my hands, had made the president's literary advisors realize that the introduction of any of the aforementioned refrains would have been superfluous and inopportune. It would, indeed, have been quite incongruous to begin by saying affectionately, Esteemed fellow citizens or My dear compatriots, as if he were about to announce that tomorrow the price of petrol will go down by fifty percent, only to proceed to present to the eyes of a horror-struck audience a bleeding, slippery, still pulsating internal organ.

life laughs at predictions and introduces words where we imagined silences, and sudden returns when we thought we would never see each other again.

The past is an immense area of stony ground that many people would like to drive across as if it were a road, while others move patiently from stone to stone, lifting each one because they need to know what lies beneath.