Age carries with it a double load of guilt, - José Saramago

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.

Todo o romance é isso, desespero, intento frustrado de que o passado não seja coisa definitivamente perdida. Só não se acabou ainda de averiguar se é o romance que impede o homem de esquecer-se ou se é a impossibilidade do esquecimento que o leva a escrever romances.

Worse still if that sameness should ever become total.