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Every Second That Passes Is Like A Door That Opens To Allow In What Has Not Yet Happened, What We Call The Future, But, To Challenge The Contradictory Nature Of What We Have Just Said, Perhaps It Would Be More Accurate To Say That The Future Is Just An Immense Void, That The Future Is Just The Time On Which The Eternal Present Feeds.

-Jose Saramago

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Every Second That Passes

Jose Saramago

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Every Second That Passes Is Like A Door That Opens To Allow In What Has Not Yet Happened, What We Call The Future, But, To Challenge The Contradictory Nature Of What We Have Just Said, Perhaps It Would Be More Accurate To Say That The Future Is Just An Immense Void, That The Future Is Just The Time On Which The Eternal Present Feeds.

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In The End, I Am Quite Normal. I Don't Have Odd Habits. I Don't Dramatize. Above All, I Do Not Romanticize The Act Of Writing. I Don't Talk About The Anguish I Suffer In Creating. I Do Not Have A Fear Of The Blank Page, Writer's Block, All Those Things That We Hear About Writers.

Such Is Our Need To Shower Blame On Some Distant Entity When It Is We Who Lack The Courage To Face Up To What Is There Before Us.

Don't Be Afraid, The Darkness You're In Is No Greater Than The Darkness Inside Your Own Body, They Are Two Darknesses Separated By A Skin, I Bet You've Never Thought Of That, You Carry A Darkness About With You All The Time And That Doesn't Frighten You...my Dear Chap, You Have To Learn To Live With The Darkness Outside Just As You Learned To Live With The Darkness Inside

You Know The Name You Were Given, You Do Not Know The Name That You Have

Words Were Not Given To Man In Order To Conceal His Thoughts.

This Is The Effect Of Panic, A Natural Effect, You Could Say That Animal Nature Is Like This, Plant Life Would Behave In Exactly The Same Way, Too, If It Did Not Have All Those Roots To Hold It In The Ground, And How Nice It Would Be To See The Trees Of The Forest Fleeing The Flames.

With The Passing Of Time, As Well As The Social Evolution And Genetic Exchange, We Ended Up Putting Our Conscience In The Colour Of Blood And In The Salt Of Tears, And, As If That Were Not Enough, We Made Our Eyes Into A Kind Of Mirror Turned Inwards, With The Result That They Often Show Without Reserve What We Are Verbally Trying To Deny.

A Stomach Accustomed To Hunger Is Satisfied With Very Little.

A Man Was On His Way To The Gallows When He Met Another, Who Asked Him: Where Are You Going, My Friend? And The Condemned Man Replied: I'm Not Going Anywhere. They're Taking Me By Force.

I Think We Are Blind, Blind But Seeing, Blind People Who Can See, But Do Not See.

Being Fired Was The Best Luck Of My Life. It Made Me Stop And Reflect. It Was The Birth Of My Life As A Writer.

The Distribution Of Tasks Among The Various Employees Follows A Simple Rule, Which Is That The Duty Of The Members Of Each Category Is To Do As Much Work As They Possibly Can, So That Only A Small Part Of That Work Need Be Passed To The Category Above. This Means That The Clerks Are Obliged To Work Without Cease From Morning To Night, Whereas The Senior Clerks Do So Only Now And Then, The Deputies Very Rarely, And The Registrar Almost Never.

Not Only Does The Universe Have Its Own Laws, All Of Them Indifferent To The Contradictory Dreams And Desires Of Humanity, And In The Formulation Of Which We Contribute Not One Iota, Apart, That Is, From The Words By Which We Clumsily Name Them, But Everything Seems To Indicate That It Uses These Laws For Aims And Objectives That Transcend And Always Will Transcend Our Understanding.

There Are Plenty Of Reasons Not To Put Up With The World As It Is, And If The Book Has Any Kind Of Message, I Suppose That's It.

I Am A Better Novelist Than A Poet, Playwright, Or Essayist.

A Tree Weeps When Cut Down, A Dog Howls When Beaten, But A Man Matures When Offended.

We Are So Afraid Of The Idea Of Having To Die... That We Always Try To Find Excuses For The Dead, As If We Were Asking Beforehand To Be Excused When It Is Our Turn.

Why Did We Become Blind, I Don't Know, Perhaps One Day We'll Find Out, Do You Want Me To Tell You What I Think, Yes, Do, I Don't Think We Did Go Blind, I Think We Are Blind, Blind But Seeing, Blind People Who Can See, But Do Not See.

I Write To Try To Understand, And Because I Have Nothing Better To Do.

We Never Consider That The Things Dogs Know About Us Are Things Of Which We Have Not The Faintest Notion.

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.

Americans Have Discovered Fear.

Blind People Do Not Need A Name, I Am My Voice, Nothing Else Matters.

We Live In A Very Peculiar World. Democracy Isn't Discussed, As If It Was Taken For Granted, As If Democracy Had Taken God's Place, Who Is Also Not Discussed.

Human Nature Is, By Definition, A Talkative One, Imprudent, Indiscreet, Gossipy, Incapable Of Closing Its Mouth And Keeping It Closed.

This Must Be What It Means To Be A Ghost, Being Certain That Life Exists, Because Your Four Senses Say So, And Yet Unable To See It.

The Wisest Man I Ever Knew In My Whole Life Could Not Read Or Write. At Four O'clock In The Morning, When The Promise Of A New Day Still Lingered Over French Lands, He Got Up From His Pallet And Left For The Fields, Taking To Pasture The Half-dozen Pigs Whose Fertility Nourished Him And His Wife.

Liking Is Probably The Best Form Of Ownership, And Ownership The Worst Form Of Liking.

...this Is The Way Fate Usually Treats Us, It's Right There Behind Us, It Has Already Reached Out A Hand To Touch Us On The Shoulder While We're Still Muttering To Ourselves, It's All Over, That's It, Who Cares Anyhow.

We Use Words To Understand Each Other And Even, Sometimes, To Find Each Other.

Somewhere In The Infinite That He Occupies, God Advances And Withdraws The Pawns Of The Other Games He Plays, But It Is Too Soon To Worry About This One, All He Need Do For The Present Is Allow Things To Take Their Natural Course, Apart From The Occasional Adjustment With The Tip Of His Little Finger To Make Sure Some Stray Thought Or Action Does Not Interfere With The Harmony Of Destinies.

The Painter Paints, The Musician Makes Music, The Novelist Writes Novels. But I Believe That We All Have Some Influence, Not Because Of The Fact That One Is An Artist, But Because We Are Citizens.

Without The Faintest Possibility Of Finding A Job, I Decided To Devote Myself To Literature: It Was About Time To Find Out What I Was Worth As A Writer.

The Worst Pain ... Isn't The Pain You Feel At The Time, It's The Pain You Feel Later On When There's Nothing You Can Do About It, They Say That Time Heals All Wounds, But We Never Live Long Enough To Test That Theory.

...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 History Of Mankind Is The History Of Our Misunderstandings With God, For He Doesn't Understand Us, And We Don't Understand Him.

Misunderstanding

Whether We Like It Or Not, The One Justification For The Existence Of All Religions Is Death, They Need Death As Much As We Need Bread To Eat.

The Best Way To Killing A Rose Is To Force It Open When It Is Still Only The Promise Of A Bud.

Even Death, Faced With The Option Of Death Or Life, She Would Choose Life.

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.

From Literature To Ecology, From The Escape Velocity Of Galaxies To The Greenhouse Effect, From Garbage Disposal Methods To Traffic Jams, Everything Is Discussed In Our World. But The Democratic System, As If It Were A Given Fact, Untouchable By Nature Until The End Of Time, We Don't Discuss That.

Garbage Disposal

As So Often Happens, The Thing Left Undone Tires You Most Of All, You Only Feel Rested When It Has Been Accomplished.

If I Could Repeat My Childhood, I Would Repeat It Exactly As It Was, With The Poverty, The Cold, Little Food, With The Flies And Pigs, All That.

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 Only Miracle We Can Perform Is To Go On Living, Said The Woman, To Preserve The Fragility Of Life From Day To Day, As If It Were Blind And Did Not Know Where To Go, And Perhaps It Is Like That, Perhaps It Really Does Not Know, It Placed Itself In Our Hands, After Giving Us Intelligence.

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.

Chaos Is Order Yet Undeciphered.

... That's How Life Should Be, When One Person Loses Heart, The Other Must Have Heart And Courage Enough For Both.

Globalization Is A Form Of Totalitarianism... It Is The Rich Who Rule, And The Poor Live As They Can.

Sometimes I Say That Writing A Novel Is The Same As Constructing A Chair: A Person Must Be Able To Sit In It, To Be Balanced On It. If I Can Produce A Great Chair, Even Better. But Above All I Have To Make Sure That It Has Four Stable Feet.

What Kind Of World Is This That Can Send Machines To Mars And Does Nothing To Stop The Killing Of A Human Being?

That Is The Dream Of All Novelists-that One Of Their Characters Will Become 'somebody.'

Unlike Joseph Her Husband, Mary Is Neither Upright Nor Pious, But She Is Not Blame For This, The Blame Lies With The Language She Speaks If Not With The Men Who Invented It, Because That Language Has No Feminine Form For The Words Upright And Pious.

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.

Human Vocabulary Is Still Not Capable, And Probably Never Will Be, Of Knowing, Recognizing, And Communicating Everything That Can Be Humanly Experienced And Felt.

No, There Are Three People In A Marriage, There's The Woman, There's The Man, And There's What I Call The Third Person, The Most Important, The Person Who Is Composed Of The Man And Woman Together.

I Presume That Nobody Will Deny The Positive Aspects Of The North American Cultural World. These Are Well Known To All. But These Aspects Do Not Make One Forget The Disastrous Effects Of The Industrial And Commercial Process Of 'cultural Lamination' That The Usa Is Perpetrating On The Planet.

Death Is The Inventor Of God.

All Stories Are Like Those About The Creation Of The Universe, No One Was There, No One Witnessed Anything, Yet Everyone Knows What Happened.

Creation Of The Universe

...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.

Ah, In Every Age There Is Always Some New Wonder To Astound Mankind Until They Grow Accustomed To It And Lose Interest.

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.

I Believe Myself To Be The Type Of Person Who Does Not Complicate His Life. I Have Always Lived My Life Without Dramatizing Things, Whether The Good Things That Have Happened To Me Or The Bad. I Simply Live Those Moments.

Age Carries With It A Double Load Of Guilt.

When I Am Occupied With A Work That Requires Continuity - A Novel, For Example - I Write Every Day.

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.

Earthenware Is Like People, It Needs To Be Well Treated.

Some Drivers Have Already Got Out Of Their Cars, Prepared To Push The Stranded Vehicle To A Spot Where It Will Not Hold Up The Traffic, They Beat Furiously On The Closed Windows, The Man Inside Turns His Head In Their Direction, First To One Side Then To The Other, He Is Clearly Shouting Something, To Judge By The Movements Of His Mouth He Appears To Be Repeating Some Words, No One Word But Three, As Turns Out To Be The Case When Someone Finally Manages To Open The Door, I Am Blind.

With The Passage Of Time, As Well As The Social Evolution And Genetic Exchange, We Ended Up Putting Our Conscience In The Color Of Our Blood And The Salt Of Our Tears.

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...

If I'm Sincere Today, What Does It Matter If I Regret It Tomorrow?

Today's Bread Does Not Eliminate Yesterday's Hunger, Much Less That Of Tomorrow.

Strictly Speaking, We Do Not Make Decisions. Decisions Make Us.

The Possibility Of The Impossible, Dreams And Illusions, Are The Subject Of My Novels.

Often When You Ask For One Thing You Receive Another, This Is The Mysterious Thing About Prayer, We Address Them To Heaven With Some Private Intention, But They Choose Their Own Path, Sometimes They Delay, Allowing Other Prayers To Overtake Them, Frequently They Overlap And Become Hybrid Prayers Of Dubious Origin, Which Quarrel And Argue Among Themselves.

Mysterious Things

Will We Ever Learn That Certain Things Can Be Understood Only If We Take The Trouble To Trace Them To Their Origins.

Very Few People Are Aware That In Each Of Our Fingers, Located Somewhere Between The Firs Phalange, The Mesophalange And The Metaphalange, There Is A Tiny Brain... It Should Be Noted That Fingers Are Without Brains, These Develop Gradually With The Passage Of Time And With The Help Of What The Eyes See... That Is Why The Fingers Have Always Excelled At Uncovering What Is Concealed.

Jeronimo, My Grandfather, Swine-herder And Story-teller, Feeling Death About To Arrive And Take Him, Went And Said Goodbye To The Trees In The Yard, One By One, Embracing Them And Crying Because He Knew He Wouldn't See Them Again. To Truly Appreciate Life We Must Remember That Nothing Lasts For Ever And Take Nothing We Enjoy For Granted. In So Doing We Stay Grateful And Happy For All Our Good Fortune.

It Is Difficult To Understand These People Who Democratically Take Part In Elections And A Referendum, But Are Then Incapable Of Democratically Accepting The Will Of The People.

If We Cannot Live Entirely Like Human Beings, At Least Let Us Do Everything In Our Power Not To Live Entirely Like Animals.

Abstention Means You Stayed At Home Or Went To The Beach. By Casting A Blank Vote, You're Saying That You Understand Your Responsibility, You Have A Political Conscience And You Came To Vote, But You Don't Agree With Any Of The Existing Parties And This Is The Only Way You Have Of Saying So.

Lord Knows Why They Depict Death With Wings When Death Is Everywhere.

As Citizens, We All Have An Obligation To Intervene And Become Involved - It's The Citizen Who Changes Things.

But It Is Also True, If This Brings Her Any Consolation, That If, Before Every Action, We Were To Begin Weighing Up The Consequences, Thinking About Them In Earnest, First The Immediate Consequences, Then The Probably, Then The Possible, Then The Imaginable Ones, We Should Never Move Beyond The Point Where Our First Thought Brought Us To A Halt.

The Only Time We Can Talk About Death Is While We're Alive, Not Afterwards.

I'm Not Pessimistic. It Is The World That Is Terrible. How Can We Be Optimistic In The Face Of A Planet Where People Live So Badly, Nature Is Being Destroyed And The Dominant Empire Is Money?

When We Are Born, When We Enter This World, It Is As If We Signed A Pact For The Rest Of Our Life, But A Day May Come When We Will Ask Ourselves Who Signed This On My Behalf?

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.

It Is Economic Power That Determines Political Power, And Governments Become The Political Functionaries Of Economic Power.

The U.s. Needs To Control The Middle East, The Gateway To Asia. It Already Has Military Installations In Uzbekistan.

In Matters Of Feeling And Of The Heart, Too Much Is Always Better Than Too Little.

There Is Nothing That Is Truly Free Nor Democratic Enough. Make No Mistake, The Internet Did Not Come To Save The World.

There Are Such Moments In Life, When, In Order For Heaven To Open, It Is Necessary For A Door To Close.

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.

Doesn't Anybody Understand That Killing In The Name Of God Only Makes Him A Murderer?

Men Are All The Same, They Think That Because They Came Out Of The Belly Of A Woman They Know All There Is To Know About Women.

When You Are Old And Realize That Time Is Running Out, You Start Imagining That You Have The Cure For All The Ills Of The World In Your Hand, And Get Frustrated Because No One Pays You Any Attention.

Anyone Who Gets Up Early By Inclination Or Has Been Forced To Rise Early Out Of Necessity Finds It Intolerable That Others Should Go On Sleeping Soundly

I Was Born In A Family Of Landless Peasants, In Azinhaga, A Small Village In The Province Of Ribatejo, On The Right Bank Of The Almonda River, Around A Hundred Kilometres North-east Of Lisbon.

. . . If There Is A Way For The World To Be Transformed For The Better, It Can Only Be Done By Pessimism; Optimists Will Never Change The World For The Better.

The Novel Is Not So Much A Literary Genre, But A Literary Space, Like A Sea That Is Filled By Many Rivers.

One Cannot Be Too Careful With Words, They Change Their Minds Just As People Do.

The Minds Of Human Beings Are Not Always Entirely At One With The World In Which They Live, Some People Have Trouble Adjusting To Reality, Basically They're Just Weak, Confused Spirits Who Use Words, Sometimes Very Skillfully, To Justify Their Cowardice.

I Don't Think It Is Worth Explaining How A Character's Nose Or Chin Looks. It Is My Feeling That Readers Will Prefer To Construct, Little By Little, Their Own Characterthe Author Will Do Well To Entrust The Reader With This Part Of The Work.

The Virtue Of Maps, They Show What Can Be Done With Limited Space, They Foresee That Everything Can Happen Therein.

The World Is Governed By Institutions That Are Not Democratic - The World Bank, The Imf, The Wto.

Just As The Habit Does Not Make The Monk, The Sceptre Does Not Make The King.

Death ... Doesn't Take Her Eyes Off Us For A Minute, So Much So That Even Those Who Are Not Yet Due To Die Feel Her Gaze Pursuing Them Constantly.

I Am The Same Person I Was Before Receiving The Nobel Prize. I Work With The Same Regularity, I Have Not Modified My Habits, I Have The Same Friends.

No Human Being Can Achieve All He Or She Desires In This Life Except In Dreams, So Good Night All.

There Are Times When It Is Best To Be Content With What One Has, So As Not To Lose Everything.

The Much-quoted Immaculate Conception Of The Virgin Mary Occurred But Once So That The World Might Know That Almighty God, When He So Chooses, Has No Need Of Men, Though He Cannot Dispense With Women.

The Time For Miracles Has Either Passed Or Not Come Yet, Besides, Miracles, Genuine Miracles, Whatever People Say, Are Not Such A Good Idea, If It Means Destroying The Very Order Of Things In Order To Improve Them.

Chaos Is Merely Order Waiting To Be Deciphered

Things Will Be Very Bad For Latin America. You Only Have To Consider The Ambitions And The Doctrines Of The Empire, Which Regards This Region As Its Backyard.

Words Are Like That, They Deceive, They Pile Up, It Seems They Do Not Know Where To Go, And, Suddenly, Because Of Two Or Three Or Four That Suddenly Come Out, Simple In Themselves, A Personal Pronoun, An Adverb, An Adjective, We Have The Excitement Of Seeing Them Coming Irresistibly To The Surface Through The Skin And The Eyes And Upsetting The Composure Of Our Feelings, Sometimes The Nerves That Can Not Bear It Any Longer, They Put Up With A Great Deal, They Put Up With Everything, It Was As If They Were Wearing Armor, We Might Say.

Death Has No Need To Be Cruel, Taking People's Lives Is More Than Enough.

Words That Come From The Heart Are Never Spoken, They Get Caught In The Throat And Can Only Be Read In Ones's Eyes.

Each Day Is A Little Bit Of History

It Is Strange How The Elderly Fall Silent When They Ought To Go On Speaking, Obliging The Young To Learn Everything From Scratch.

We've All Had Our Moments Of Weakness, And If We Manage To Get Through Today Without Any, We'll Be Sure To Have Some Tomorrow.

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

But Truths Need To Be Repeated Many Times So That They Don't, Poor Things, Lapse Into Oblivion.

I Always Ask Two Questions: How Many Countries Have Military Bases In The United States? And In How Many Countries Does The United States Not Have Military Bases?

Just Like Everything Else In Life, Let Time Take Its Course And It Will Find A Solution.

There Is Nothing Healthier For A Man Than To Walk On His Own Two Legs.

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.

In General, Fakirs, Like Scribes And Potters, Are Sitting Down, When He's Standing Up, A Fakir Is Just Like An Other Man, And Sitting Down, He'll Be Smaller Than The Others.

For Me, Writing Is A Job. I Do Not Separate The Work From The Act Of Writing Like Two Things That Have Nothing To Do With Each Other. I Arrange Words One After Another, Or One In Front Of Another, To Tell A Story, To Say Something That I Consider Important Or Useful, Or At Least Important Or Useful To Me. It Is Nothing More Than This.

I Am Traveling Less In Order To Be Able To Write More. I Select My Travel Destinations According To Their Degree Of Usefulness To My Work.

Men Are Angels Born Without Wings, Nothing Could Be Nicer Than To Be Born Without Wings And To Make Them Grow.

Everything In This World Can Volunteer Some Reply, What Takes Up Time Is Posing The Questions.

I Can't Imagine Myself Outside Any Kind Of Social Or Political Involvement.

Dignity Has No Price ... When Someone Starts Making Small Concessions, In The End Life Loses All Meaning.

Writer's Make National Literature, While Translators Make Universal Literature.

One Can Show No Greater Respect Than To Weep For A Stranger.

Creating Is Always So Much More Stimulating Than Destroying.

We Are Marching Against The Law Of The Jungle That The United States And Its Acolytes Old And New Want To Impose On The World.

A Writer Is A Man Like Any Other: He Dreams. And My Dream Was To Be Able To Say Of This Book, When I Finished: 'this Is A Book About Alentejo.'

People Live With The Illusion That We Have A Democratic System, But It's Only The Outward Form Of One. In Reality We Live In A Plutocracy, A Government Of The Rich.

There Are Those Who Deny Me The Right To Speak Of God, Because I Am Not A Believer. And I Say That I Have Every Right In The World. I Want To Talk About God Because It Is A Problem That Affects All Humanity.

Words Have Their Own Hierarchy, Their Own Protocol, Their Own Artistic Titles, Their Own Plebeian Stigmas.

God, The Devil, Good, Evil, It's All In Our Heads, Not In Heaven Or Hell, Which We Also Invented. We Do Not Realize That, Having Invented God, We Immediately Became His Slaves.

Though I Had Come Into The World On 16 November 1922, My Official Documents Show That I Was Born Two Days Later, On The 18th. It Was Thanks To This Petty Fraud That My Family Escaped From Paying The Fine For Not Having Registered My Birth At The Proper Legal Time.

The Wisest Man I Ever Knew In My Whole Life Could Not Read Or Write.

I Had No Books At Home. I Started To Frequent A Public Library In Lisbon. It Was There, With No Help Except Curiosity And The Will To Learn, That My Taste For Reading Developed And Was Refined.

We Can Escape From Everything, But Not From Ourselves.

The Wise Man Contents Himself With What He Has, Until Such Time As He Invents Something Better.

In A King, Modesty Would Be A Sign Of Weakness.

I Don't Doubt That A Man Can Live Perfectly Well On His Own, But I'm Convinced That He Begins To Die As Soon As He Closes The Door Of His House Behind Him.

I Never Appreciated 'positive Heroes' In Literature. They Are Almost Always Cliches, Copies Of Copies, Until The Model Is Exhausted. I Prefer Perplexity, Doubt, Uncertainty, Not Just Because It Provides A More 'productive' Literary Raw Material, But Because That Is The Way We Humans Really Are.

If You Don't Write Your Books, Nobody Else Will Do It For You. No One Else Has Lived Your Life.

I Can't Imagine Myself Outside Any Kind Of Social Or Political Involvement. Yes, I'm A Writer, But I Live In This World, And My Writing Doesn't Exist On A Separate Level. And If People Know Who I Am And Read My Books, Well, Good; That Way, If I Have Something More To Say, Then Everyone Benefits.

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.

The Period That I Could Consider The Most Important In My Literary Work Came About Beginning With The Revolution, And In A Certain Way, Developed As A Consequence Of The Revolution. But It Was Also A Result Of The Counterrevolutionary Coup Of November 1975.

Americans Have Discovered The Fragility Of Life, That Ominous Fragility That The Rest Of The World Either Already Experienced Or Is Experiencing Now With Terrible Intensity.

Society Has To Change, But The Political Powers We Have At The Moment Are Not Enough To Effect This Change. The Whole Democratic System Would Have To Be Rethought.

Forgive Me If What Has Seemed Little To You, To Me Is All.

A Journey Never Ends. Only The Travellers End.

Blindness Is A Private Matter Between A Person And The Eyes With Which He Or She Was Born.

...the Human Being To Lack That Second Skin We Call Egoism Has Not Yet Been Born, It Lasts Much Longer Than The Other One, That Bleeds So Readily.

I Do Not Just Write, I Write What I Am. If There Is A Secret, Perhaps That Is It.

Oh, I'm Not Just Going Too Far, I've Arrived.

We Say Fine, Even Though We May Be Dying, And This Is Commonly Known As Taking One's Courage In Both Hands, A Phenomenon That Has Only Been Observed In The Human Species.

I Believe That I've Been Asked All Possible Questions. I, Myself, If I Were A Journalist, Would Not Know What To Ask Me.

It Is Not Pornography That Is Obscene, It Is Hunger That Is Obscene.

A Human Being Is A Being Who Is Constantly 'under Construction,' But Also, In A Parallel Fashion, Always In A State Of Constant Destruction.

I Am A Person With Leftist Convictions, And Always Have Been.

At The End Of The 1950s, I Started Working At A Publishing Company, Estudios Cor, As Production Manager, So Returning, But Not As An Author, To The World Of Letters I Had Left Some Years Before.

In Effect I Am Not A Novelist, But Rather A Failed Essayist Who Started To Write Novels Because He Didn't Know How To Write Essays.

As My Cat Would Say, All Hours Are Good For Sleeping.

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.

The Problem Is That The Right Doesn't Need Any Ideas To Govern, But The Left Can't Govern Without Ideas.

Every Thing In Life Is A Uniform; The Only Time Our Bodies Are Truly In Civilian Dress Is When We're Naked.

Because Each Of You Has His Or Her Own Death, You Carry It With You In A Secret Place From The Moment You're Born, It Belongs To You And You Belong To It.

Sleep Is A Skilled Magician, It Changes The Proportions Of Things, The Distances Between Them, It Separates People And They're Lying Next To Each Other, Brings Them Together And They Can Barely See One Another.

En Ningún Momento De La Historia, En Ningún Lugar Del Planeta, Las Religiones Han Servido Para Que Los Seres Humanos Se Acerquen Unos A Los Otros. Por El Contrario, Sólo Han Servido Para Separar, Para Quemar, Para Torturar. No Creo En Dios, No Lo Necesito Y Además Soy Buena Persona.

Nothing So Tires A Person As Having To Struggle, Not With Himself, But With An Abstraction.

Can You Imagine What Bush Would Say If Someone Like Hugo Chavez Asked Him For A Little Piece Of Land To Install A Military Base, And He Only Wanted To Plant A Venezuelan Flag There?

Perhaps Only In A World Of The Blind Will Things Be What They Truly Are.

You Never Know Beforehand What People Are Capable Of, You Have To Wait, Give It Time, It's Time That Rules, Time Is Our Gambling Partner On The Other Side Of The Table And It Holds All The Cards Of The Deck In Its Hand, We Have To Guess The Winning Cards Of Life, Our Lives.

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.

It Takes Little Or Nothing To Undo Reputations, The Merest Trifle Makes And Remakes Them, It Is Simply A Question Of Finding The Best Means Of Engaging The Confidence Or Interest Of Those Who Are To Become One's Unsuspecting Echoes Or Accomplices.

When All Is Said And Done, What Is Clear Is That All Lives End Before Their Time.

The Sun Appears In One Of The Upper Corners Of The Rectangle, On The Left Of Anyone Looking At The Picture.

Doubt Is The Privilege Of Those Who Have Lived A Long Time

I Was A Good Pupil At Primary School: In The Second Class I Was Writing With No Spelling Mistakes, And The Third And Fourth Classes Were Done In A Single Year.

We Know That Happiness Is Short-lived, That We Fail To Cherish It When It Is Within Our Grasp And Value It Only When It Has Vanished Forever.

Your Questions Are False If You Already Know The Answer.

In The End We Discover The Only Condition For Living Is To Die.

Perfect Moments, Especially When They Verge On The Sublime Have The Grave Disadvantage Of Being Very Short Lived, Which In Fact, Being Obvious, We Would Not Need To Mention Were It Not That They Have A Still Greater Disadvantage, Which Is That We Do Not Know What To Do Once They Are Over.

Each Part In Itself Constitutes The Whole To Which It Belongs.

I Consider Books To Be Good For Our Health, And Also Our Spirits, And They Help Us To Become Poets Or Scientists, To Understand The Stars Or Else To Discover Them Deep Within The Aspirations Of Certain Characters, Those Who Sometimes, On Certain Evenings, Escape From The Pages And Walk Among Us Humans, Perhaps The Most Human Of Us All.

The Church Has Never Been Asked To Explain Anything, Our Speciality, Along With Ballistics, Has Always Been The Neutralisation Of The Overly Curious Mind Through Faith.

The Attitude Of Insolent Haughtiness Is Characteristic Of The Relationships Americans Form With What Is Alien To Them, With Others.

...sometimes We Ask Ourselves Why Happiness Took So Long To Arrive, Why It Didn't Come Sooner, But Appears Suddenly, As Now, When We've Given Up Hope Of It Ever Arriving, It's Likely Then That We Won't Know What To Do, And Rather Than It Being A Question Of Choosing Between Laughter And Tears, We Will Be Filled By A Secret Anxiety To Which We Might Not Know How To Respond At All.

Inside Us There Is Something That Has No Name, That Something Is What We Are.

That It's Possible Not To See A Lie Even When It's In Front Of Us.

The Ear Has To Be Educated If One Wishes To Appreciate Musical Sounds, Just As The Eyes Must Learn To Distinguish The Value Of Words.

We're Not Short Of Movements Proclaiming That A Different World Is Possible, But Unless We Can Coordinate Them Into An International Movement, Capitalism Just Laughs At All These Little Organisations.

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Dylan McDermott

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