Famous quotes by Jose Saramago:

"This is how everyone has to begin, men who have never known a woman, women who have never known a man, until the day comes for the one who knows to teach the one who does not"

"Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is."

"All the scheming and plotting in the world won't result in something lasting, transcendent. Anything that's authentic, that's real, comes in the form of a gift. Even if by accident."

"Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt."

"What kind of world is this that can send machines to Mars and does nothing to stop the killing of a human being?"

"Words were not given to man in order to conceal his thoughts."

"I think we are blind. Blind people who can see, but do not see."

"There are times when it is best to be content with what one has, so as not to lose everything."

"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."

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

"The wisest man I ever knew in my whole life could not read or write."

"There are plenty of reasons not to put up with the world as it is."

"Abstention means you stayed at home or went to the beach. By casting a blank vote, you're saying you have a political conscience but you don't agree with any of the existing parties."

"The world had already changed before September 11. The world has been going through a process of change over the last 20 or 30 years. A civilization ends, another one begins."

"The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers."

"I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist."

"Look what happened with the employment law in France-the law was withdrawn because the people marched in the streets. I think what we need is a global protest movement of people who won't give up."

"As citizens, we all have an obligation to intervene and become involved - it's the citizen who changes things."

"A human being is a being who is constantly 'under construction,' but also, in a parallel fashion, always in a state of constant destruction."

"Beginning with adolescence, my political formation was oriented in the ideological direction of Marxism. It was natural, being that my thinking was influenced by an atmosphere of active critical resistance. That was the way it was during all of the dictatorship and up to the Revolution of 1974."