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José Saramago Zitate

José Saramago war ein portugiesischer Romancier, Lyriker, Essayist, Erzähler, Dramatiker und Tagebuchautor. 1998 wurde ihm der Nobelpreis für Literatur verliehen. Wikipedia  

✵ 16. November 1922 – 18. Juni 2010
José Saramago Foto
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José Saramago Berühmte Zitate

„Wir stecken alle in der Scheiße. Optimist kann eigentlich nur sein, wer gefühllos, dumm oder Millionär ist.“

José Saramago

dito

„Sehenden Auges bleiben wir Blinde. Wir können sehen, aber sehen nicht. Wir leben mit dem alltäglichen Horror und haben gelernt, wegzuschauen.“

José Saramago

„Ach was, ich habe ein dickes Fell!“
Interview von Evelyn Finger mit Saramago für die ZEIT anlässlich der Verfilmung seines Romans „Stadt der Blinden“, DIE ZEIT Nr. 44 vom 23. Oktober 2008 http://www.zeit.de/2008/44/Saramago/seite-2, DIE ZEIT online vom 24. Oktober 2008, abgerufen am 21. April 2016

„Ich bin kein Pessimist, sondern bloß ein gut informierter Optimist.“

José Saramago

„Nobelpreisträger Saramago gestorben“ http://www.zeit.de/kultur/literatur/2010-06/saramago-portugal-nobelpreistraeger, DIE ZEIT online vom 18. Juni 2010, abgerufen am 21. April 2016

José Saramago: Zitate auf Englisch

“None of his colleagues noticed who had arrived, they responded to his greetings as they always did, Good morning, Senhor José, they said and they did not know to whom they were speaking.”

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José Saramago buch All the Names

Quelle: All the Names (1997), p. 16

“Each part in itself constitutes the whole to which it belongs.”

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José Saramago buch The Cave

Quelle: The Cave (2000), p. 68 (Vintage 2003)

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

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José Saramago buch Blindness

Dentro de nós há uma coisa que não tem nome, essa coisa é o que somos.
Quelle: Blindness (1995), p. 276

“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.”

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José Saramago

Interview with "El País", 2009.

“So often we need a whole lifetime in order to change our life, we think a great deal, weigh things up and vacillate, then we go back to the beginning, we think and think, we displace ourselves on the tracks of time with a circular movement, like those clouds of dust, dead leaves, debris, that have no strength for anything more, better by far that we should live in a land of hurricanes.”

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José Saramago buch The Stone Raft

The Stone Raft (1994)

“The caressing, melodious tones of humility and flattery never sang in the ears of the clerk Senhor José, these have never had a place in the chromatic scale of feelings normally shown to him.”

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José Saramago buch All the Names

Quelle: All the Names (1997), p. 8

“God is the silence of the universe, and man is the cry that gives meaning to that silence.”

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José Saramago

Deus é o silêncio do universo, e o homem o grito que dá um sentido a esse silêncio.
Lanzarote Notebooks (1990), quoted in The Notebook, entry for 9 October 2008.

“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.”

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José Saramago buch The Cave

Quelle: The Cave (2000), p. 20 (Vintage 2003)

“Men, forgive Him, for He knows not what He has done.”

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José Saramago buch The Gospel According to Jesus Christ

Quelle: The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991), p. 347; Jesus' last words from the cross.
Kontext: Jesus then realized he had been brought here under false pretences, as the lamb is led to sacrifice and that his life had been planned for death since the very beginning. Remembering the river of blood and suffering that would flow from his side and flood the entire earth, he called out to the open sky where God could be seen smiling, Men, forgive Him, for He knows not what He has done.

“Besides the conversation of women, it is dreams that keep the world in orbit.”

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José Saramago buch Baltasar and Blimunda

Quelle: Baltasar and Blimunda (1982), p. 107
Kontext: Besides the conversation of women, it is dreams that keep the world in orbit. But dreams also form a diadem of moons, therefore the sky is that splendour inside a man's head, if his head is not, in fact, his own unique sky.

“There comes a point when the confused or abused person hears a voice saying in his head, Oh well, might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, and, depending on the particular situation in which he finds him he either spends his last bit of money on a lottery ticket, or places on the gaming table the watch he inherited from his father and silver cigarette case that was a gift from his mother, or bets everything he has on red even though he knows that red has come up five times in a row”

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José Saramago buch The Cave

Quelle: The Cave (2000), p. 14 (Vintage 2003)

“The sceptics, who are many and stubborn, claim that, when it comes to human nature, if it is true that the opportunity does not always make the thief, it is also true that it helps a lot.”

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José Saramago buch Blindness

Quelle: Blindness (1995), pp. 16-17

“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.”

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José Saramago

Intervention in the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, February of 1992; quoted in Las leyes antidiscriminatorias en el Mercosur: Impactos de la III conferencia mundial contra el racismo, la discriminación racial, la xenofobia y las formas conexas de intolerancia, Durban, 2001: informe sobre el seminario realizado en Montevideo, 29 y 30 de abril de 2002. Published by Organizaciones Mundo Afro, 2002 163 pages.

“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.”

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José Saramago

Quoted in Evans, 2002, p. 13, as reported in Fundamentals of action research, Vol. I (2005), p. 305.

“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.”

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José Saramago buch The Cave

Quelle: The Cave (2000), p. 29 (Vintage 2003)

“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.”

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José Saramago buch All the Names

The woman in the ground floor flat; p. 48
All the Names (1997)

“The human being should be the absolute priority. It seems it is more important to reach the planet Mars than prevent 13 million Africans dying of hunger. Why would I want to know if there is water on Mars if we are polluting the water here on Earth, or doing nothing to avoid it? Priorities need to be redefined, but there is no chance of this, if we don't confront the need to know what democracy is.”

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José Saramago

Quoted in New African (IC Magazines Limited, 2003), p. 25.

“Lord knows why they depict death with wings when death is everywhere.”

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José Saramago buch The Cave

Quelle: The Cave (2000), p. 112 (Vintage 2003)

“This is the stuff we're made of, half indifference and half malice.”

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José Saramago buch Blindness

Quelle: Blindness (1995), p. 32

“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…”

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José Saramago

Referring to his grandfather, Jerónimo Meirinho.
Nobel Lecture (1998)

“Earthenware is like people, it needs to be well treated.”

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José Saramago buch The Cave

Quelle: The Cave (2000), p. 21 (Vintage 2003)

“No religion, without exception, will ever serve to bring men together and reconcile them. They have been and will continue to be a cause of unspeakable sufferings, of carnage, or monstrous physical and spiritual acts of violence that constitute one of the darkest chapters in human history.”

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José Saramago

Le religioni, tutte, senza eccezione, non serviranno mai per avvicinare e riconciliare gli uomini e, al contrario, sono state e continuano a essere causa di sofferenze inenarrabili, di stragi, di mostruose violenze fisiche e spirituali che costituiscono uno dei più tenebrosi capitoli della misera storia umana.
La Repubblica http://www.repubblica.it/online/mondo/saramago/saramago/saramago.html (20 September 2001)

“Yes [death has become a taboo]. Today people want to avoid the subject and hide the deaths that happen around them. It is as if the world were a hotel where the dead usually disappear at night, without any guest being able to notice their presence. While movies and television address death, they do not touch the fundamental point of finitude. The deaths are false, the good guys get shot and come back to life. It's another way of treating death as unreal.”

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José Saramago

ÉPOCA Interview (in Portuguese) http://revistaepoca.globo.com/Epoca/0,6993,EPT1061569-1666-2,00.html, São Paulo, 2005.

“Every novel is like this, desperation, a frustrated attempt to save something of the past. Except that it still has not been established whether it is the novel that prevents man from forgetting himself or the impossibility of forgetfulness that makes him write novels.”

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José Saramago

Todo o romance é isso, desespero, intento frustrado de que o passado não seja coisa definitivamente perdida. Só não se acabou ainda de averiguar se é o romance que impede o homem de esquecer-se ou se é a impossibilidade do esquecimento que o leva a escrever romances.
Quelle: The History of the Siege of Lisbon (1989), p. 47

“In between these four whitewashed walls, on this tiled floor, notice the broken corners, how some tiles have been worn smooth, how many feet have passed this way, and look how interesting this trail of ants is, travelling along the joins as if they were valleys, while up above, projected against the white sky of the ceiling and the sun of the lamp, tall towers are moving, they are men, as the ants well know, having, for generations, experienced the weight of their feet and the long, hot spout of water that falls from a kind of pendulous external intestine, ants all over the world have been drowned or crushed by these, but it seems they will escape this fate now, for the men are occupied with other things. […]
Let's take this ant, or, rather, let's not, because that would involve picking it up, let us merely consider it, because it is one of the larger ones and because it raises its head like a dog, it's walking along very close to the wall, together with its fellow ants it will have time to complete its long journey ten times over between the ants' nest and whatever it is that it finds so interesting, curious or perhaps merely nourishing in this secret room […]. One of the men has fallen to the ground, he's on the same level as the ants now, we don't know if he can see them, but they see him, and he will fall so often that, in the end, they will know by heart his face, the color of his hair and eyes, the shape of his ear, the dark arc of his eyebrow, the faint shadow at the corner of his mouth, and later, back in the ants' nest, they will weave long stories for the enlightenment of future generations, because it is useful for the young to know what happens out there in the world. The man fell and the others dragged him to his feet again, shouting at him, asking two different questions at the same time, how could he possibly answer them even if he wanted to, which is not the case, because the man who fell and was dragged to his feet will die without saying a word. Only moans will issue from his mouth, and in the silence of his soul only deep sighs, and even when his teeth are broken and he has to spit them out, which will prompt the other two men to hit him again for soiling state property, even then the sound will be of spitting and nothing more, that unconscious reflex of the lips, and then the dribble of saliva thickened with blood that falls to the floor, thus stimulating the taste buds of the ants, who telegraph from one to the other news of this singularly red manna fallen from such a white heaven.
The man fell again. It's the same one, said the ants, the same ear shape, the same arc of eyebrow, the same shadow at the corner of the mouth, there's no mistaking him, why is it that it is always the same man who falls, why doesn't he defend himself, fight back. […] The ants are surprised, but only fleetingly. After all, they have their own duties, their own timetables to keep, it is quite enough that they raise their heads like dogs and fix their feeble vision on the fallen man to check that he is the same one and not some new variant in the story. The larger ant walked along the remaining stretch of wall, slipped under the door, and some time will pass before it reappears to find everything changed, well, that's just a manner of speaking, there are still three men there, but the two who do not fall never stop moving, it must be some kind of game, there's no other explanation […]. [T]hey grab him by the shoulders and propel him willy-nilly in the direction of the wall, so that sometimes he hits his back, sometimes his head, or else his poor bruised face smashes into the whitewash and leaves on it a trace of blood, not a lot, just whatever spurts forth from his mouth and right eyebrow. And if they leave him there, he, not his blood, slides down the wall and he ends up kneeling on the ground, beside the little trail of ants, who are startled by the sudden fall from on high of that great mass, which doesn't, in the end, even graze them. And when he stays there for some time, one ant attaches itself to his clothing, wanting to take a closer look, the fool, it will be the first ant to die, because the next blow falls on precisely that spot, the ant doesn't feel the second blow, but the man does.”

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José Saramago buch Raised from the Ground

Quelle: Raised from the Ground (1980), pp. 172–174

“Even the strongest spirits have the moments of irresistible weakness”

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José Saramago buch The Cave

Quelle: The Cave (2000), p. 15 (Vintage 2003)

“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.”

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José Saramago buch Blindness

Quelle: Blindness (1995), p. 2

“Blind. The apprentice thought, "we are blind", and he sat down and wrote Blindness to remind those who might read it that we pervert reason when we humiliate life, that human dignity is insulted every day by the powerful of our world, that the universal lie has replaced the plural truths, that man stopped respecting himself when he lost the respect due to his fellow-creatures.”

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José Saramago

Nobel Lecture (1998)

“Where do begin, he asked, Where you always have to begin, at the beginning”

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José Saramago buch The Cave

Quelle: The Cave (2000), p. 53 (Vintage 2003)

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