…proper nouns, which are the emptiest words of all, unless we put human beings inside of them.
— Jose Saramago
It is not only the blind who need a walking stick to probe one step ahead, or a dog to niff out danger, even a man with the sight of two eyes needs a light he can follow, one in which he believes or hopes to believe, his very doubts serving in the absence of anything better.
— Jose Saramago, Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
In the end it turned out to be a simple detective story, an ordinary tale of death and investigation, the murderer, the victim, and finally the detective, all three accomplices to the crime. In my honest opinion, the reader of a mystery is the only real survivor of the story he is reading, unless it is as the one real survivor that every reader reads every story.
— Jose Saramago, Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
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