Life & Wisdom Quote by Jose Saramago

Refusal is the engine in Saramago's line: not optimism, not despair, but a stubborn moral impatience with the so-called normal. "Plenty of reasons" lands like a dry tally, almost bureaucratic, as if the case against reality is already overdetermined and the only remaining question is why we keep acting surprised. The phrase "put up with" is doing the real work. It shrinks "the world as it is" to something like a bad roommate or a humiliating job - endured, normalized, joked about, then quietly internalized. Saramago's intent is to puncture that anesthetic. He isn't offering a utopia; he's challenging the posture of resignation.

The subtext is political without needing a slogan: complacency is complicity. Coming from a writer who lived under Portugal's Estado Novo dictatorship and spent his career anatomizing power, crowd logic, and institutional cruelty, the line reads as a warning about how easily injustice becomes furniture. In novels like Blindness, Saramago shows catastrophe not as an alien intrusion but as society's latent habits brought to the surface: scapegoating, bureaucratic indifference, the quick privatization of empathy. "The world as it is" is a world that benefits from your fatigue.

What makes the sentence work rhetorically is its restraint. It's not a shout; it's a permission slip. It validates irritation as intelligence, discontent as a form of clarity. The world doesn't need to be unimaginable to be unacceptable; it only needs to be familiar.