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"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."
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"Words are clothes that thoughts wear."
"Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning: the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination."
"A word is not filling in the gaps, but the fertilization of silence."
"He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear."
"Our language now has become quick-moving (in syllables), and may be very supple and nimble, but is rather thin in sound and in sense too often diffuse and vague. the language of our forefathers, especially in verse, was slow, not very nimble, but very sonorous, and was intensely packed and concentrated - or could be in a good poet."
"Chameleonesque, hobbitish, unicorned, stompled, selfishism, and unwakeable may not be real words, but you do know what they mean."
"One should always cite what one does not understand at all in the language one understands the least."
"Where do the words gowhen we have said them?"
Explore more quotes by Jose Saramago
"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."
"Without the faintest possibility of finding a job, I decided to devote myself to literature: it was about time to find out what I was worth as a writer."
"As citizens, we all have an obligation to intervene and become involved - it's the citizen who changes things."
"The world had already changed before September 11. The world has been going through a process of change over the last 20 or 30 years. A civilization ends, another one begins."
"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?"
"The world is governed by institutions that are not democratic - the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO."
"Look what happened with the employment law in France-the law was withdrawn because the people marched in the streets. I think what we need is a global protest movement of people who won't give up."
"A human being is a being who is constantly 'under construction,' but also, in a parallel fashion, always in a state of constant destruction."
"Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be, of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt."
"I presume that nobody will deny the positive aspects of the North American cultural world. These are well known to all. But these aspects do not make one forget the disastrous effects of the industrial and commercial process of 'cultural lamination' that the USA is perpetrating on the planet."
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