José Saramago, A Nobel Prize In 11 Sentences

Not long ago one of the great names in literature and one of the most important people in Portuguese cultural life, José de Sousa, passed away. Popularly known as  José Saramago, he is still very present with his own lyrics and with the legacy he left us after 87 years of life in capital letters.

Born in a small town on the Portuguese coast, the son of landless peasants, humility and commitment were dominant features of his biography, while the apparent simplicity is evident in his literary work, paradoxically complex and profound.

Someone who understood his profession as a job with a certain essence of masonry, above the romantic image that we can have of a writer. Laughing, he affirmed that self-help books help someone, as the name says, it is the author and that he understood death as something that is born with us and that in the same way dies with us.

Some of his phrases

Below we send you phrases from José Saramago’s books that you will surely feel close to you:

• “It seemed that we had reached the end of the road and it turns out that it was just a curve open to another landscape and new curiosities.” ( The year of the death of Ricardo Reis)
• “We are the memory that we have and the responsibility that we assume, without memory we do not exist and without responsibility we may not deserve to exist. ” ( Notebooks from Lanzarote )
• “Time is not a rope that can be measured knot by knot, time is an oblique and undulating surface that only memory is capable of moving and approaching.” ( The gospel according to Jesus Christ )
• “ Joy and pain are not like oil and water, they coexist. ”( Essay on blindness )
• “Life is like paintings, it is convenient to look at them four steps back.” ( All names )
• ” The more you disguise yourself, the more you will look like yourself ” ( The duplicate man )

His last years and present

In addition, we point out some of his phrases in his last years of life:

• “The past is an immense scree that many would like to travel as if it were a highway, while others patiently go from stone to stone and lift them, because they need to know what is under them. Sometimes they get scorpions or scorpions, but it is not impossible that, at least once, an elephant appears. ” ( The Elephant’s Journey )
• “The only compensation was in love, not in the obligatory love of kinship, so often a burden imposed by conventions, but spontaneous love that feeds on itself.” ( Skylight )

• ” The defeat has something positive, it is never final. On the other hand, victory has something negative, it is never final. “
• “Only if we stop to think about the little things will we come to understand the big ones.”
• “ Everyone tells me that I have to exercise, that it is good for my health. But I have never heard anyone say to an athlete: “you have to read. “

José Saramago Foundation

José Saramago was a peculiar writer, with a strong personality of style and a narration very close to his readers that reflected his own character very well: he defined himself as first Portuguese, then Iberian and  when I feel like European.

His relevance is such that the José Saramago Foundation updates information about him every day and allows us to know him a little more : if you have been interested in this article, I invite you to read some of his novels, because you will not regret the teachings that they leave us.