Baltasar and Blimunda
Quotes from the Book
Don't be afraid, the darkness you're in is no greater than the darkness inside your own body, they are two darknesses separated by a skin, I bet you've never thought of that, you carry a darkness about with you all the time and that doesn't frighten you...my dear chap, you have to learn to live with the darkness outside just as you learned to live with the darkness inside
old photographs are very deceiving, they give us the illusion that we are alive in them, and it's not true, the person we are looking at no longer exists, and if that person could see us, he or she would not recognise him -- or herself in us, 'Who's that looking at me so sadly,' he or she would say.
Strictly speaking, we do not make decisions, decisions make us.
Nothing so tires a person as having to struggle, not with himself, but with an abstraction.
... we know that it is the search that gives meaning to any find and that one often has to travel a long way in order to arrive at what is near.
All the great sadnesses, great temptations, and great mistakes are almost always the result of being alone in life, without a prudent friend to advise us when we are troubled by something more serious than our normal everyday problems.
Al contrario de lo que se cree, sentido y significado nunca han sido lo mismo, el significado se queda aquí, es directo, literal, explícito, cerrado en sí mismo, unívoco, podríamos decir, mientras que le sentido no es capaz de permanecer quieto, hierve de segundos sentidos, terceros y cuartos, de direcciones radicales que se van dividiendo y subdividiendo en ramas y ramajes hasta que se pierdende vista, el sentido de cada palabra se parece a una estrella cuando se pone a proyectar mareas vivas por el espacio, vientos cósmicos, perturbaciones magnéticas, aflicciones".
Contrary to what is generally believed, meaning and sense were never the same thing, meaning shows itself at once, direct, literal, explicit, enclosed in itself, univocal, if you like, while sense cannot stay still, it seethes with second, third and fourth senses, radiating out in different directions that divide and subdivide into branches and branchlets, until they disappear from view, the sense of every word is like a star hurling spring tides out into space, cosmic winds, magnetic perturbations, afflictions.
It is well known that the human mind very often makes decisions for reasons it clearly does not know, presumably because it does so after having travelled the paths of the mind at such speed that, afterwards, it cannot recognise those paths, let alone find them again.
What torments people have to go through when they leave the safety of their homes to become embroiled in mad adventures.
...las viejas fotografías engañan mucho, nos dan la ilusión de que estamos vivos en ellas, y no es cierto, la persona a quien estamos mirando ya no existe, y ella, si pudiese vernos, no se reconocería en nosotros.
..then he added, as if requiring a response to his own remark, 'Probably the greater the difference, the greater the similarity, and the greater the similarity, the greater the difference,' at that moment he did not yet know how right he was.
Así como la muerte definitiva es el fruto último de la voluntad de olvido, así la voluntad de recuerdo podrá perpetuarnos la vida.
...indeed it is in the General Cemetery that the results of progress are set out before the eyes of the studious or the merely curious, there are even those who say that a cemetery like this is a kind of library which contains not books but buried people, it really doesn't matter, you can learn as much from people as from books.
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About José Saramago
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- José Saramago
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- Fiction
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Keep reading
The Double
Acceptance
Night Train to Lisbon
S.
Flights
Daniel Deronda
The Empusium
Think of a Number
The Complete Stories
The Shadow of the Wind
Out of Oz
Ficciones
Sexing the Cherry
The Names
The Book That Broke the World
The Complete Short Stories
Pensées
The Recognitions
The Ground Beneath Her Feet
The Summer Without Men
Six Characters in Search of an Author
A Luminous Republic
Correction
Cities of the Plain
1Q84
The Magic Mountain
The Face of Another
The Mysterious Mr. Quin
In Search of Lost Time
Libra
The Graveyard Book
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
The Secret History
Housekeeping
There but for the
That Hideous Strength
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
Angle of Repose
The Winter of Our Discontent
Authority
Blue Octavo Notebooks
The Lost Symbol
The Signature of All Things
The Sound of Things Falling
The Angel Esmeralda
Winter
The Guermantes Way
The Star Diaries
Embers
Time Regained
The Story of the Lost Child
The Golden Compass
The Fall
The Map of the Sky
V.
Concrete
The Darkness That Comes Before
Crime and Punishment
No One Writes Back
The Blue Flower

