You know the name you were given,
you do not know the name that you have.
José Saramago, All The Names trans. Margaret Jull Costa. Thank you, Death Deconstructed.
We say to the confused, Know thyself, as if knowing yourself was not the fifth and most difficult of human arithmetical operations, we say to the apathetic, Where there’s a will, there’s a way, as if the brute realities of the world did not amuse themselves each day by turning that phrase on its head, we say to the indecisive, Begin at the beginning, as if the beginning were the clearly visible point of a loosely wound thread and all we had to do was to keep pulling until we reached the other end, and as if, between the former and the latter, we had held in our hands a smooth, continuous thread with no knots to untie, no snarls to untangle, a complete impossibility in the life of a skein, or indeed, if we may be permitted one more stock phrase, in the skein of life.
José Saramago, with much gratitude to Whiskey River, who never ceases to amaze.
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.
José Saramago. Today in the River.
Sebastião Salgado, Portrait of José Saramago. From: mianoti, toseethesummersky & guiglherme
Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.
José Saramago, “Blindness” (via springsummerfallwinterandspring, awritersruminations & aperfectcommotion)
Some people spend their entire lives reading but never get beyond reading the words on the page, they don’t understand that the words are merely stepping stones placed across a fast-flowing river, and the reason they’re there is so that we can reach the farther shore, it’s the other side that matters.
José Saramago (from Chasing Light)
