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"A human being is a being who is constantly 'under construction,' but also, in a parallel fashion, always in a state of constant destruction."
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"Great is the difference betwixt a man's being frightened at, and humbled for his sins."
"It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad."
"The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down."
"The nobility of a human being is strictly independent of that of his convictions."
"To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved."
"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself."
"And they write innumerable books; being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation, and dodging his emptiness."
Explore more quotes by Jose Saramago
"The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers."
"Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be, of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt."
"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."
"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."
"The U.S. needs to control the Middle East, the gateway to Asia. It already has military installations in Uzbekistan."
"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."
"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."
"There are times when it is best to be content with what one has, so as not to lose everything."
"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."
"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."
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