José Saramago, a Nobel 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 continues to be very present with his own lyrics and with the legacy he left us after 87 years of life with capital letters.

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

José Saramago was a lover of letters who spoke simply because he thought that the word above all had to be understood and understandable, otherwise it would lose its meaning.

Someone who understood his profession as a job with a certain essence of masonry, above the romantic image that we may have of a writer. That he laughingly stated that if self-help books help anyone, 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 like we had reached the end of the road and it turned 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 we have and the responsibility we assume, Without memory we do not exist and without responsibility perhaps we do not deserve to exist..” (Lanzarote notebooks)“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 making it move and approximate.” (The gospel according to Jesus Christ)“Joy and pain are not like oil and water, but they coexist.” (Essay on blindness)“Life is like paintings, it is advisable to look at them four steps back.” (All the names)“The more you dress up, the more you will look like yourself” (The duplicate man)

His last years and current events

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

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“The past is an immense scree that many would like to travel through as if it were a highway, while others, patiently, go from stone to stone, and lift them, because they need to know what is beneath them. Sometimes scorpions or scorpions appear, 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 the spontaneous love that feeds on itself.” (Skylight)“The defeat has something positive, is never final. On the other hand, victory has something negative, it is never definitive. “Only if we stop to think about the small things will we come to understand the big things.”Everyone tells me that I have to exercise, that it is good for my health. But I have never heard anyone tell an athlete: “you have to read“.”

José Saramago Foundation

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

Its relevance is such that The José Saramago Foundation updates information about him every day and allows us to get 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 lessons they leave us.