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Sunday, June 20, 2010

Remembering Saramago

Here are a few gems from Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago, who died Friday:

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

"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?"

"Since the world began, for every person who is born another dies." -from The Gospel According to Jesus Christ

"After watering and feeding the donkeys, the travelers finally sat down to eat, the men first, of course. How often we need to remind ourselves that Eve was created after Adam and taken from his rib. Will we ever learn that certain things can be understood only if we take the trouble to trace them to their origins." -from The Gospel According to Jesus Christ

"The attitude of insolent haughtiness is characteristic of the relationship Americans form with what is alien to them, with others."

"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."

"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."

"All dictionaries together do not contain even half of the words we needed to understand each other." -from The Double (and posted on Saramago's blog less than a month ago under the header "Babel")

3 comments:

JoePo said...

But when will there be DANCING???

Unknown said...

How did the US get military bases in other countries?

Evie Hemphill said...

Both of these are very, very good questions. Which I shall decline attempting to answer. :)

These out-of-context quotes, by the way, do not compare to the kind of skill and thought contained in his books.