José Saramago, one of my favourite writers and the only Portuguese speaking Nobel Literature Prize winner, died on Friday, June 18, 2010. He was 87 years old and left us an amazing body of work. I grew up with his characters and, as he says: “without them I wouldn’t be the person I am today”.
We cry.
“In one sense it could even be said that, letter-by-letter, word-by-word, page-by-page, book after book, I have been successively implanting in the man I was the characters I created. I believe that without them I wouldn't be the person I am today; without them maybe my life wouldn't have succeeded in becoming more than an inexact sketch, a promise that like so many others remained only a promise, the existence of someone who maybe might have been but in the end could not manage to be.”
José Saramago (Nobel lecture, 1998)
“In the end we discover the only condition for living is to die.”
José Saramago (On his 2005 novel Death With Interruptions, which depicts Death as a woman who goes on strike because she is fed up with being hated by people)
"Se podes olhar, vê. Se podes ver, repara."
José Saramago (Blindness)
"...for human words are like shadows, and shadows are incapable of explaining light and between shadow and light there is the opaque body from which words are born.."
José Saramago (The Gospel According to Jesus Christ)
"When all is said and done, what is clear is that all lives end before their time."
José Saramago (Blindness)
"The day before is what we bring to the day we're actually living through, life is a matter of carrying along all those days-before just as someone might carry stones, and when we can no longer cope with the load, the work is done, the last day is the only one that is not the day before another day."
José Saramago (The Cave)
"...we would understand much more about life’s complexities if we applied ourselves to an assiduous study of its contradictions, instead of wasting time
on identities and coherences, seeing as these have a duty to provide their own explanations.”
José Saramago (The Cave)
“Death has no need to be cruel, taking people's lives is more than enough.”
José Saramago (Death with Interruptions)
