641 Quotes by José Saramago

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.

Yet human experience and the practice of communication have shown throughout the ages that definitions are an illusion, like having a speech defect and trying to say love but unable to get the word out, or, better, having a tongue in one's head but unable to feel love.

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

We are finally living in Plato's cave, if we consider how those who were imprisoned within the cave - who could do nothing but watch those shadows passing on the back wall - were convinced that those shadows were their one and only reality. I see a profound similarity to all this in the epoch we're now living in. We no longer live simply through images: we live through images that don't even exist, which are the result not of physical projection but of pure virtuality.

We all have our moments of weakness, just as well that we are still capable of weeping, tears are often our salvation, there are times when we would die if we did not weep - Blindness

...you have to leave the island in order to see the island, that we can't see ourselves unless we become free of ourselves, Unless we escape from ourselves you mean, No, that's not the same thing.

The world is governed by institutions that are not democratic - the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO.

You know the name you were given, you do not know the name that you have

Death is present every day in our lives. It's not that I take pleasure in the morbid fascination of it, but it is a fact of life.