José Saramago

Fate [is] the supreme order to which even gods are subject. And what of men, what is their function. To challenge order, to change fate. For the better. For better or for worse, it makes no difference, the point is to keep fate from being fate.

The son of Joseph and Mary was born, like any other child, covered with his mother's blood, dripping with mucus, and suffering in silence. He cried because they made him cry, and he will cry for this one and only reason.

If we cannot live entirely like human beings, at least let us do everything in our power not to live entirely like animals.

Then Jesus slowly turned to look at her and said, I have never been with a woman. Mary held his hands, This is how everyone has to begin, men who have never known a woman, women who have never known a man, until the day comes for the one who knows to teach the one who does not.

If you can see, look. If you can look, observe.

We have an odd relationship with words. We learn a few when we are small, throughout our lives we collect others through education, conversation, our contact with books, and yet, in comparison, there are only a tiny number about whose meaning, sense, and denotation we would have absolutely no doubts if, one day, we were to ask ourselves seriously what they meant. Thus we affirm and deny, thus we convince and are convinced, thus we argue, deduce, and conclude, wandering fearlessly over the surface of concepts about which we have only the vaguest of ideas, and, despite the false air of confidence that we generally affect as we feel our way along the road in the verbal darkness, we manage, more or less, to understand each other and even, sometimes, to find each other.

[T]here are times when it is best to be content with what one has, so as not to lose everything.

Worse still if that sameness should ever become total.

Where do begin, he asked, Where you always have to begin, at the beginning,

The emptiness of old age had caused him to forget that, in matters of feeling and of the heart, too much is always better than too little.

Even the strongest spirits have the moments of irresistible weakness,

… because contrary to what people say, two weaknesses don't make for a still greater weakness, but for renewed strength ...