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Everyone was like the faces on a playing card, upside down either way. -- Saul Bellow
If I'm out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog. -- Saul Bellow
And what about all the good I have in my heart - does it mean anything? -- Saul Bellow
The good die young, but I have been spared to build myself up so that I may end my life as good as gold. The senior dead will be proud of me ... I will join the Y.M.C.A. of the immortals. Only, in this very hour, I may be missing eternity. -- Saul Bellow
But maybe time was invented so that misery might have an end. So that it shouldn't last forever? There may be something in this. And bliss, just the opposite, is eternal? There is no time in bliss. All the clocks were thrown out of heaven. -- Saul Bellow
In the end you can't save your soul and life by thought. But if you think, the least of the consolation prizes is the world. -- Saul Bellow
The sun was shut up in a cold bottle. -- Saul Bellow
What was the matter that pureness of feeling couldn't be kept up? I see I met those writers in the big book of utopias at a peculiar time. In those utopias, set up by hopes and art, how could you overlook the part of nature or be sure you could keep the feelings up? -- Saul Bellow
What Homo sapien imagines, he may slowly convert himself to. -- Saul Bellow
The first undressing of two lovers is a most special event. -- Saul Bellow
There are evils that have the ability to survive identification and go on for ever ... money, for instance, or war. -- Saul Bellow
Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living. But the over-examined life makes you wish you were dead. Given the alternative, I'd rather be living. -- Saul Bellow
Did I say that the world had never had better color? I left something out of account, a limping, crippled consideration which seems to lose ground as you reach beauty and Orizaba flowers, but soon you find it has preceded you. -- Saul Bellow
Look here, because they were born you think they have to turn out to be men? That's just an old-fashioned idea. And who tells them that? A big organization. One more big organization. A big organization makes dough or it doesn't last. If it makes dough it's for dough. -- Saul Bellow
If this was so, I was sunk, for by now I was more in love than I could stand, as if some mineral had got into my veins and arteries and I ached, flesh and bones, the way you will on the verge of the grippe. -- Saul Bellow
Humankind struggles with collective powers for its freedom, the individual struggles with dehumanization for the possession of his soul. -- Saul Bellow
Even if I am not the honestest type in the world I don't want to lie more than is average. -- Saul Bellow
The Indian temperament is so excitable, you know. -- Saul Bellow
The human being now simply can't close his elected garment about himself. Obligations to one's fellows perhaps prevent full buttoning by artists. -- Saul Bellow
We were friends, somehow. But in the end, somehow, he intended to be a mortal enemy. All the while that he was making the gestures of a close and precious friend he was fattening my soul in a coop till it was ready for killing -- Saul Bellow
Somewhere in every intellectual is a dumb prick. -- Saul Bellow
Herzog abandoned this theme with characteristic abruptness -- Saul Bellow
It wasn't that he was specially ungenerous but that he put things off to give his generosity a longer and more significant route. -- Saul Bellow
The sand swallows burst out of their scupper holes in the bluffs and out over the transparent drown of the water, back again to the white, to the brown, to the black, from moving to stock-still sand waves and water-worked woods and roots that hugged and twisted in the sun. -- Saul Bellow
The lesson of an American life like my father's ... is that achievements are compatible with decency (112). -- Saul Bellow
Losing a parent is something like driving through a plate-glass window. You didn't know it was there until it shattered, and then for years to come you're picking up the pieces
down to the last glassy splinter. -- Saul Bellow
Nobody asks you to love the whole world, only to be honest, ehrlich. Don't have a loud mouth. The more you love people the more they'll mix you up. A child loves, a person respects. Respect is better than love. -- Saul Bellow
Death discredits. Survival is the whole success. The voice of the dead goes away. There isn't any memory. The power that's established fills the earth and destiny is whatever survives, so whatever is is right. -- Saul Bellow
History, memory - that is what makes us human, that, and our knowledge of death: 'by man came death'. For knowledge of death makes us wish to extend our lives at the expense of others. And this is the root of the struggle for power. -- Saul Bellow
People forget how sensational the things are that they do. They don't see it on themselves. It blends into the background of their daily life. -- Saul Bellow
It's no small matter to become rich and famous by saying exactly what you think - to say it in your own words, without compromise. -- Saul Bellow
To him, perpetual thought of death was a sin. Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead. -- Saul Bellow
Society is what beats me. Alone I can be pretty good, but let me go among people and there's the devil to pay. -- Saul Bellow
The main reason for rewriting is not to achieve a smooth surface, but to discover the inner truth of your characters. -- Saul Bellow
Seashores are good for madmen - provided they're not too mad. -- Saul Bellow
The only real distinction at this dangerous moment in human history and cosmic development has nothing to do with medals and ribbons. Not to fall asleep is distinguished. Everything else is mere popcorn. -- Saul Bellow
I quit thinking long ago that all old people came to rest from the things they were out for in their younger years. -- Saul Bellow
Conquered people tend to be witty. -- Saul Bellow
In any true life you must go and be exposed outside the small circle that encompasses two or three heads in the same history of love. -- Saul Bellow
Associate with the noblest people you can find; read the best books; live with the mighty; but learn to be happy alone. -- Saul Bellow
Is the carbon molecule lined with thought? -- Saul Bellow
Art is order, made out of the chaos of life. -- Saul Bellow
The challenge of modern freedom, or the combination of isolation and freedom which confronts you, is to make yourself up. The danger is that you may emerge from the process as a not-entirely-human creature.
(Referenced in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People by Toby Young) -- Saul Bellow
A human soul devoid of longing was a soul deformed, deprived of its highest good, sick unto death. -- Saul Bellow
Shall I run back into the desert ... and stay there until the devil has passed out of me and I am fit to meet human kind again without driving it to despair at the first look? I haven't had enough desert yet. -- Saul Bellow
I would like to explain that I consider prayer above all an act of gratitude for existence. -- Saul Bellow
These were his friends of the business community; a man in business had to have such, and he visited and entertained but neither touched nor was touched, ever. -- Saul Bellow
Guys like you make life easy for some women. -- Saul Bellow
Imagination is a force of nature. -- Saul Bellow
For the first time in history, the human species as a whole has gone into politics. Everyone is in the act, and there is no telling what may come of it. -- Saul Bellow
More commonly suffering breaks people, crushes them, and is simply unilluminating. You see how gruesomely human beings are destroyed by pain, when they have the added torment of losing their humanity first, so that their death is a total defeat ... -- Saul Bellow
Nobody should be a mystery intentionally. Unintentionally is mysterious enough. -- Saul Bellow
I am deeply moved when I write. I get turned on by it. I've never used any drugs for stimulation. I don't use words loosely. When I'm working and the right word comes, there is an answering resonance within me. There is also a hardness of intention that goes with it. There is no idleness in it. -- Saul Bellow
It's goodbye to reality when love sets in. -- Saul Bellow
Well, I need a job. Something that'll leave me the free time I want."
"I like the way you arrange your life. What do you intend to do with this free time?"
"I intend to use it." I didn't like the implication of this. Why should he need his time free and I be questioned? -- Saul Bellow
Great pressure is brought to bear to make us undervalue ourselves. On the other hand, civilization teaches that each of us is an inestimable prize. There are, then, these two preparations: one for life and the other for death. Therefore we value and are ashamed to value ourselves. -- Saul Bellow
Art attempts to find in the universe, in matter as well as in the facts of life, what is fundamental, enduring, essential. -- Saul Bellow
You have to fight for your life. That's the chief condition on which you hold it. -- Saul Bellow
As for Sono, she was trying to instruct him, to show how a man should treat a woman. The pride of the peacock, the lust of the goat, and the wrath of the lion are the glory and wisdom of God. -- Saul Bellow
Retirement is an illusion. Not a reward but a mantrap. The bankrupt underside of success. A shortcut to death. Golf courses are too much like cemeteries. -- Saul Bellow
I still had the craving that I had given in to all summer long when I had lived on books, to have the reach to grasp both ends of the frame and turn the big image-taking glass to any scene of the world. -- Saul Bellow
Any artist should be grateful for a naive grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately. -- Saul Bellow
I'm glad I haven't lived in vain. -- Saul Bellow
You're used to difficult women. To struggle. Perhaps you like it when they give you a bad time." "Every treasure is guarded by dragons. That's how you can tell it's valuable. ... Do you mind if I unbutton my collar? It seems to be pressing on an artery. -- Saul Bellow
But fathers are soft on daughters. Look how Dad favors Angela. He gave her ten times more. Because she reminded him of Mae West. He was always smiling at her boobs. He wasn't aware of it. Mother and I saw it. -- Saul Bellow
It was clear that the man was no fool. But what was the use of not being a fool if you acted like this? -- Saul Bellow
It is sometimes necessary to repeat what all know. All mapmakers should place the Mississippi in the same location and avoid originality. -- Saul Bellow
There's a kind of emptiness at the center of life ... nothing to form your life on, or by. -- Saul Bellow
Human consciousness at present is a sort of battlefield. And you know what Tolstoy tells us about battles in War and Peace. Nobody really knows what is going on during a battle ... -- Saul Bellow
He knew he would think better clearer thoughts after bathing in the sea. His mother had believed in the good effects of bathing, but she had died so young. -- Saul Bellow
Keep out of this, please, will you, Mildred? A child isn't a toy." "Oh," she said, "they grow up. Time does it more than fathers and mothers. The parents take too much credit. -- Saul Bellow
His mind took one of its odd jumps. He opened a clean page in his grimy notebook, and in the twig-divided shade of a wild cherry, infested with tent caterpillars, he began to make notes for a poem. -- Saul Bellow
Still women- women. They do themselves more credit, there's more reality in women. They live closer to their nature. They have to. It's more with them. They have the breasts. They see their blood, and it does them good, while men are led to be vainer. -- Saul Bellow
I don't know exactly how it's done. I let it alone a good deal. -- Saul Bellow
I mean you have been disappointed in love, but don't you know how many things there are to be disappointed in besides love? You are lucky to be still disappointed in love. Later it may be even more terrible. -- Saul Bellow
He wondered at times whether he didn't belong to a class of people secretly convinced they had an arrangement with fate; in return for docility or ingenuous good will they were to be shielded from the worst brutalities in life. -- Saul Bellow
How we all love extreme cases and apocalypses, fires, drownings, stranglings, and the rest of it. The bigger our mild, basically ethical, safe middle classes grow the more radical excitement is in demand. Mild or moderate truthfulness or accuracy seems to have no pull at all. -- Saul Bellow
Since the last question, also the first one, the quesiton of death, offers us the interesting alternatives of disintegrating ourselves by our own wills in proof of our "freedom," or the acknowledging that we owe a human life to this waking spell of existence, regardless of the void. -- Saul Bellow
Fun comes hard - like, alas, its prarens, pleasure and happiness, whom we have to pursue. -- Saul Bellow
I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction. -- Saul Bellow
It would not be practical for her to hate herself. Luckily, God sends a substitute, a husband. -- Saul Bellow
There was a disturbance in my heart, a voice that spoke there and said, I want, I want, I want! It happened every afternoon, and when I tried to suppress it it got even stronger. -- Saul Bellow
The late philosopher Morris R. Cohen of CCNY was asked by a student in the metaphysics course, Professor Cohen, how do I know that I exist? The keen old prof replied, And who is asking? -- Saul Bellow
And the process started over again. Once more it was, Who are you? And I had to confess that I didn't know where to begin. -- Saul Bellow
I want to tell you, don't marry suffering. Some people do. They get married to it, and sleep and eat together, just as husband and wife. If they go with joy they think it's adultery. -- Saul Bellow
The same things are done by us, over and over, with terrible predictability. One may be forgiven, in view of this, for wishing at least to associate with beauty. -- Saul Bellow
It was all there. Only he was not through with love and hate elsewhere. -- Saul Bellow
But there are things you can't consult anybody about. -- Saul Bellow
When I didn't argue he was satisfied he had persuaded me, and was not the first to make that mistake. -- Saul Bellow
If only we dind't have hearts we wouldn't know how sad it was. But we carry around these hearts ... which give us away. -- Saul Bellow
Some men seem to know exactly where their opportunities lie; they break prisons and cross whole Siberias to pursue them. One room holds me. -- Saul Bellow
One way or another the no doubt mad idea entered my mind that my own actions had historic importance and this fantasy (?) made it appear that people who harmed me were interfering with an important experiment. -- Saul Bellow
The modern reader (or viewer, or listener: let's include everybody) is perilously overloaded. His attention is, to use the latest lingo,'targeted' by powerful forces? Our consciousness is a staging area, a field of operations for all kinds of enterprises, which make free use of it. -- Saul Bellow
Maybe America didn't need art and inner miracles. It had so many outer ones. The USA was a big operation, very big. The more it, the less we. -- Saul Bellow
We take foreigners to be incomplete Americans
convinced that we must help and hasten their evolution. -- Saul Bellow
In Los Angeles all the loose objects in the country were collected, as if America had been tilted and everything that wasn't tightly screwed down had slid into Southern California. -- Saul Bellow
Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing you hold down the adjoining. -- Saul Bellow
We are all such accidents. We do not make up history and culture. We simply appear, not by our own choice. We make what we can of our condition with the means available. We must accept the mixture as we find it - the impurity of it, the tragedy of it, the hope of it. -- Saul Bellow
Many common lies and hypocrisies are like that, just out of the harmony of the moment. -- Saul Bellow
He yelled, Charlie, you know where I am, don't you? All right, Charlie, this isn't literature. This is life. -- Saul Bellow
In politics continental Europe was infantile - horrifying. What America lacked, for all its political stability, was the capacity to enjoy intellectual pleasures as though they were sensual pleasures. This is what Europe offered, or was said to offer. -- Saul Bellow
Emancipation resulting in madness. Unlimited freedom to choose and play a tremendous variety of roles with a lot of coarse energy. -- Saul Bellow
From Euclid to Newton there were straight lines. The modern age analyzes the wavers. -- Saul Bellow
If I had a child of school age, I would send him to one of the Waldorf Schools. -- Saul Bellow
Mimi didn't care about secrecy. She led a proclaimed life, and once she got talking she held back nothing. -- Saul Bellow
Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death. -- Saul Bellow
There haven't been civilizations without cities. But what about cities without civilizations? An inhuman thing, if possible, to have so many people together who beget nothing on one another. No, but it is not possible, and the dreary begets its own fire, and so this never happens. -- Saul Bellow
All human accomplishment has this same origin, identically. Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination! It converts to actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems! -- Saul Bellow
Bringing people into the here-and-now. The real universe. That's the present moment. The past is no good to us. The future is full of anxiety. Only the present is real
the here-and-now. Seize the day. -- Saul Bellow
I have, perhaps, a slave-like constitution which is too easily restrained by bonds; it then becomes rebellious and bursts out in a comic revolution. -- Saul Bellow
But enough of that
here I am. Hineni! How marvelously beautiful it is today. He stopped in the overgrown yard, shut his eyes in the sun, against flashes of crimson, and drew in the odors of catalpa-bells, soil, honeysuckle, wild onions, and herbs. -- Saul Bellow
I am a true adorer of life, and if I can't reach as high as the face of it, I plant my kiss somewhere lower down. Those who understand will require no further explanation. -- Saul Bellow
Some big insect flew in and began walking on the table. I don't know what insect it was, but it was brown, shining, and rich in structures. In the city the big universal chain of insects gets thin, but where there's a leaf or two it'll be represented. -- Saul Bellow
I wish my dead days would quit bothering me and leave me alone. The bad stuff keeps coming back, and it's the worst rhythm there is. The repetition of a man's bad self, that's the worst suffering that's ever been known. -- Saul Bellow
Your authority and my degeneracy are one in the same. -- Saul Bellow
We are always looking for the book it is necessary to read next. -- Saul Bellow
Well, what o you want?" I said. "I am the type of guy who couldn't survive without disfigurement. Life has worked me over. It wasn't just the war, either ... I got a bad wound, you know. But the shots of life ... " I gave myself a bang on the breast. "Right here! You know what I mean, King? -- Saul Bellow
And I'm convinced that knowing the names of things braces people up. -- Saul Bellow
Whenever I write a dramatic poem I can't understand why the characters should ever want to be anything but poets themselves. -- Saul Bellow
Again! It was like the question asked by Tennyson about the flower in the crannied wall. That is, to answer it might involve the history of the universe. -- Saul Bellow
It's not up to me ... to make the world consistent. -- Saul Bellow
Not that life should end is so terrible in itself, but that it should end with so many disappointments in the essential. -- Saul Bellow
Everybody I ever knew wanted to show in some way how he held the world together. This only comes from feeling the strain of holding yourself together, and it gets exaggerated into the whole world from the hard labor you put into it. -- Saul Bellow
How lovely she could be! her face was gay and round, pink, the blue of her eyes was clear. Very different from the terrifying menstrual ice of her rages, the look of the murderess. -- Saul Bellow
The secret motive of the absent-minded is to be innocent while guilty. Absent-mindedness is spurious innocence. -- Saul Bellow
I blame myself for not often enough seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary. Somewhere in his journals, Dostoyevky remarks that a writer can begin anywhere, at the most commonplace thing, scratch around in it long enough, pry and dig away long enough, and lo!, soon he will hit upon the marvelous. -- Saul Bellow
IF THE GREAT ANDROMEDA GALAXY had to depend on you to hold it up, where would it be now but fallen way to hell? -- Saul Bellow
Even worse is the discovery that one has been living out certain greeting-card sentiments, with ribbons of middle-class virtue tied in a bow around one's heart. -- Saul Bellow
You don't know the meaning of true love if you think it can be deliberately selected. You just love, that's all. A natural force, irresistible. -- Saul Bellow
There is an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are, and what this life is for. -- Saul Bellow
We are funny creatures. We don't see the stars as they are, so why do we love them? They are not small gold objects, but endless fire. -- Saul Bellow
When finally you're done speaking you're dumb forever after, and when you're through stirring you go still, but this is no reason to decline to speak and stir or to be what you are. -- Saul Bellow
She's very pretty but she's honey from the icebox, if you know what I mean. Cold sweets won't spread. -- Saul Bellow
The best and purest human beings, from the beginning of time, have understood that life is sacred. -- Saul Bellow
I want! I want! I want! -- Saul Bellow
Oh, God," Wilhelm prayed, "Let me out of my trouble. Let me out of my thoughts, and let me do something better with myself. For all the time I have wasted I am very sorry. Let me out of this clutch and into a different life. For I am all balled up. Have mercy. -- Saul Bellow
Search me," I said. "I'm a city boy myself. They must be crocuses. -- Saul Bellow
I am something of a crank about sleep, for if I get seven and a quarter hours instead of eight I feel afflicted and drag myself around, although there's nothing really wrong with me. It's just another idea. That's how it is with my ideas; they seem to get strong while I weaken. -- Saul Bellow
A fool can throw a stone in a pond that 100 wise men can not get out. -- Saul Bellow
Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door. -- Saul Bellow
You have to have the power to employ pain, to repent, to be illuminated, you must have the opportunity and even the time. -- Saul Bellow
A man must have limits and cannot give in to the wild desires to be everything and everyone and everything to everyone. -- Saul Bellow
Goodness is achieved not in a vacuum, but in the company of other men, attended by love. -- Saul Bellow
She was what we used to call a suicide blonde
dyed by her own hand. -- Saul Bellow
Do we always, always to the point of misery, do a thing? -- Saul Bellow
I don't like to write from a flat, cold position. You must like what you're doing very much or like the people
either like them or hate them. You can't be indifferent. -- Saul Bellow
In this view the body itself, with its two arms and vertical length, was compared to the Cross, on which you knew the agony of consciousness and separate being. -- Saul Bellow
The soul has to find and hold its ground against hostile forces, sometimes embodied in ideas which frequently deny its very existence, and which indeed often seem to be trying to annul it altogether. -- Saul Bellow
There's the most extraordinary, unheard of poetry buried in America, but none of the conventional means known to culture can even begin to extract it...the agony is too deep, the disorder too big for art enterprises undertaken in the old way. -- Saul Bellow
A writer is a reader moved to emulation. -- Saul Bellow
I immersed myself in The Periodic Table gladly and gratefully. There is nothing superfluous here, everything this book contains is essential. It is wonderful pure, and beautifully translated ... I was deeply impressed. -- Saul Bellow
You never know what forms self-respect will take, especially with people whose rules of life are few. -- Saul Bellow
John Hawkes is an extraordinary writer. I have always admired his books. They should he more widely read. -- Saul Bellow
Here we write well when we expose frauds and hypocrites. We are great at counting warts and blemishes and weighting feet of clay. In expressing love, we belong among the underdeveloped countries. -- Saul Bellow
Depressives cannot surrender childhood
not even the pains of childhood. -- Saul Bellow
New York makes one think of the collapse of civilization, about Sodom and Gomorrah, the end of the world. The end wouldn't come as a surprise here. Many people already bank on it. -- Saul Bellow
Do you have feelings? There are correct and incorrect ways of indicating them. Do you have an inner life? It is nobody's business but your own. Do you have emotions? Strangle them. -- Saul Bellow
One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away. -- Saul Bellow
In the depths of a man's being there was something that responded with a quack to such perfume. Quack! -- Saul Bellow
The life of every citizen is becoming a business. This, it seems to me, is one of the worst interpretations of the meaning of human life history has ever seen. Man's life is not a business. -- Saul Bellow
My feelings were big, sad, comfortless, of a thinking animal, my heart acting like an orb filled too big for my chest, not from revulsion, which I have to say I didn't feel, but over-all general misery. -- Saul Bellow
Here in the city she had gilded her nails. They shone. And she had put on a velvet dress, this soft red one, which was heavy. The buttons were in the form of seashells. -- Saul Bellow
It was probably no accident that it was the cripple Hephaestus who made ingenious machines; a normal man didn't have to hoist or jack himself over hindrances by means of cranks, chains and metal parts. Then it was in the line of human advance that Einhorn could do so much. -- Saul Bellow
Moses loved his relatives quite openly and even helplessly . . . It was childish of him; he knew that. He could only sigh at himself, that he should be so undeveloped on that significant side of his nature. -- Saul Bellow
Whoever wants to reach a distant goal must take small steps. -- Saul Bellow
Strict and literal truthfulness was a trivial game and might even be a disagreeable neurotic affliction. -- Saul Bellow
I wondered at first whether she might not be feigning timidity out of courtesy to a man of an older generation, but a cold gin moisture came out on her beautiful face and she appeared to be appealing to me do something. -- Saul Bellow
A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep. -- Saul Bellow
My face too blind, my mind too limited, my instincts too narrow. But this intensity, doesn't it mean anything? -- Saul Bellow
A man is only as good as what he loves. -- Saul Bellow
The two real problems in life are boredom and death. -- Saul Bellow
Anxiety destroys scale, and suffering makes us lose perspective. -- Saul Bellow
But Mimi- her tenderness didn't have an easy visibility. You wondered what it would be, and after what terrible manifestations it would appear. -- Saul Bellow
He had come into a view of mutability, and I too could see that one is only ostensibly born to remain in specified limits. -- Saul Bellow
A good novel is worth more then the best scientific study. -- Saul Bellow
There is only one way to defeat the enemy, and that is to write as well as one can. The best argument is an undeniably good book. -- Saul Bellow
No, the truth must be something we understand at once, without an introduction or explanation, but so common and familiar that we don't always realize it's around us. -- Saul Bellow
The hour that burst the spirit's sleep... -- Saul Bellow
Death is going to take the boundaries away from us, that we should no more be persons. That's what death is about. When that is what life also wants to be about, how can you feel except rebellious? -- Saul Bellow
There is something funny about the human condition, and civilized intelligence makes fun of its own ideas. -- Saul Bellow
To rip off a piece of lover's temper was a pleasure in her deepest vein of enjoyment. -- Saul Bellow
Live or die, but don't poison everything. -- Saul Bellow
The only truly intersting side of the matter was the intimate design of the injury, the fact that it was so penetrating, custom-made exactly to your measure. It's fascinating that hatred should be so personal as to be almost loving. The knife and the wound aching for each other. -- Saul Bellow
There've been times when just because I kept my mouth shut and didn't say what I thought, I felt my strength increasing. Still, I don't seem to know what i think till I see what i say. -- Saul Bellow
It's wasted on dummies." (Life is). "They give it to dummies and fools. -- Saul Bellow
Just because your soul is being torn to pieces doesn't mean that you stop analyzing the phenomena. -- Saul Bellow
I am willing without further exercise in pain to open my heart. And this needs no doctrine or theology of suffering. We love apocalypses too much, and crisis ethics and florid extremism with its thrilling language. Excuse me, no. I've had all the monstrosity I want. -- Saul Bellow
I am not an ornithologist - I am a bird. -- Saul Bellow
Fidelity is for phonographs -- Saul Bellow
Death is the black backing on the mirror that allows us to see anything at all. -- Saul Bellow
If you could arrange to avoid that routine job-world, you were an intellectual or an artist. Too restless, tremorous, agitated, too mad to sit at a desk eight hours a day, you needed an institution - a higher institution. -- Saul Bellow
You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write. -- Saul Bellow
What did Danton lose his head for, or why was there a Napoleon, if it wasn't to make a nobility of us all? -- Saul Bellow
You have one of two choices. Either you can panic and start making frantic attempts to reform under the glare of these awful critical eyes, or you can just say, The hell with you! I know what I'm doing. If you don't yet, it's because you haven't given me an attentive reading. -- Saul Bellow
The flesh would shrink and go, the blood would dry, but no one believes in his mind of minds or heart of hearts that the pictures do stop. -- Saul Bellow
Ninety per cent of life is a nightmare, do you think I am going to get it rounded up to hundred per cent? -- Saul Bellow
Let the enemies of life step down. -- Saul Bellow
Excuse me ... but I reject your definitions of me. -- Saul Bellow
There I stretched out on the low bed and remained for days, sick. If Tertullian came to the window of heaven to rejoice in the sight of the damned, as he said he'd do, he might have seen my leg across his line of vision through the sunlight. That was how I felt. -- Saul Bellow
I must play the instrument I've got. -- Saul Bellow
As for Thea, sometimes she looked more barbarous than they did in spite of the civilized lipstick and conventional shape of the jodhpurs she wore. -- Saul Bellow
If love is love, it's free. -- Saul Bellow
Americans must be the most sententious people in history. Far too busy to be religious, they have always felt that they sorely needed guidance. -- Saul Bellow
The more you love people the more they'll mix you up. -- Saul Bellow
What art thou?' Nothing. That's the answer. Nothing. In the heart of hearts- Nothing! So of course you can't stand that and want to be Something, and you try. But instead of being this Something, the man puts it over on everybody instead. -- Saul Bellow
A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life. -- Saul Bellow
What is art but a way of seeing? -- Saul Bellow
Life, said Samuel Butler, is like giving a concert on the violin while learning to play the instrument - that, friends, is real wisdom. -- Saul Bellow
Everybody wants to have intimate conversations, but the smart fellows don't give out, only the fools. The smart fellows talk intimately about the fools, and examine them all over and give them advice. -- Saul Bellow
. . . Nietzche himself had a Christian view of history, seeing the present moment always as some crisis, some fall from classical greatness, some corruption or evil to be saved from. -- Saul Bellow
Sometimes I wonder," I said, "if people who are going to tell the truth shouldn't make sure first that they can defend themselves. -- Saul Bellow
An exchange occurs between man and woman. Love and thought complete each other in the human pair, and something like an exchange of souls takes place, according to the divine plan. -- Saul Bellow
Nobody should pretend to be always one hundred per cent honest. I wish I knew how to be seventy, sixty per cent." I swore she must be one hundred and ten, two hundred. -- Saul Bellow
That's so often what it is with machinery: be somewhat in doubt and it carries the decision. -- Saul Bellow
What use was war without also love? -- Saul Bellow
The ocean was waiting with grand and bitter provocations, as if it invited you to think how deep it was, how much colder than your blood or saltier, or to outguess it, to tell which were its feints or passes and which its real intentions, meaning business. -- Saul Bellow
Go through what is comprehensible and you conclude that only the incomprehensible gives any light. -- Saul Bellow
As the wicked flee when none pursueth, so does the middle-class wrestle when none contendeth. They cried out for freedom, it came down on them in a flood. Nothing remains but a few floating timbers of psychotherapy. -- Saul Bellow
Open discussion of many major public questions has for some time now been taboo. We can't open our mouths without being denounced as racists, misogynists, supremacists, imperialists or fascists. As for the media, they stand ready to trash anyone so designated. -- Saul Bellow
Yes, these business people have great energy. There's a question as to what's burned to produce it and what things we can and can't burn. -- Saul Bellow
You can spend the entire second half of your life recovering from the mistakes of the first half. -- Saul Bellow
Beauty is not a human invention. -- Saul Bellow
Between human beings there are only two alternatives, either brotherhood or crime. -- Saul Bellow
For God's sake,' the dog is saying, 'open the universe a little more! -- Saul Bellow
One must bear in mind the odd angle or slant that the rays of love have to take in order to reach a heart like mine. -- Saul Bellow
All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac. -- Saul Bellow
At times I feel like a socket that remembers its tooth. -- Saul Bellow
Psychoanalysis pretends to investigate the Unconscious. The Unconscious by definition is what you are not conscious of. But the Analysts already know what's in it - they should, because they put it all in beforehand. -- Saul Bellow
There are times when the most practical thing is to lie down. -- Saul Bellow
You have, like the external world, your own phenomena inside. -- Saul Bellow
Would never understand what women want. What do they want? They breath salad and drink human blood. -- Saul Bellow
There were people who believed Herzog was rather simple, that his humane feelings were childish. That he had been spared the destruction of certain sentiments as the pet goose is spared the axe. -- Saul Bellow
I would as lief look upon a piece of pastrami-stained paper as on the face of Alfred Kazin. -- Saul Bellow
Language is a spiritual mansion in which you live and nobody has the right to evict you. -- Saul Bellow
The poor guy," she said, and this was remorse over her savage speed and rashness as well as pity for this boy, haunting the mouth of an alley with that toy of swift decisions. -- Saul Bellow
I don't think the struggles of desire can ever be won. Ages of longing and willing, willing and longing, and how have they ended? In a draw, dust and dust. -- Saul Bellow
When a man's breast feels like a cage from which all the dark birds have flown - he is free, he is light. And he longs to have his vultures back again. He wants his customary struggles, his nameless, empty works, his anger, his afflictions and his sins. -- Saul Bellow
The old continued to have one resurgence of foolishness after another, until the organism gave out altogether. -- Saul Bellow
Our society, like decadent Rome, has turned into an amusement society, with writers chief among the court jesters -- Saul Bellow
The terms which, in his inmost heart, each man knows. As I know mine. As all know. For that is the truth of it - that we all know, God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know. -- Saul Bellow
Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? -- Saul Bellow
Therefore we didn't talk of genuine things. -- Saul Bellow
There is much to be said for exotic marriages. If your husband is a bore, it takes years longer to discover. -- Saul Bellow
(Socrates) said there were only two possibilities. Either the soul is immortal or, after death, things would be again as blank as they were before we were born. -- Saul Bellow
Readiness to answer all questions is the infallible sign of stupidity. -- Saul Bellow
No school without spectacular eccentrics and crazy hearts is worth attending. -- Saul Bellow
No realistic, sane person goes around Chicago without protection. -- Saul Bellow
The body, she says, is subject to the force of gravity. But the soul is ruled by levity, pure. -- Saul Bellow
Happiness can only be found if you can free yourself of all other distractions. -- Saul Bellow
It hardly does much good to have a complex mind without actually being a philosopher. -- Saul Bellow
People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned. -- Saul Bellow
I am moneys medium. It passes through me- taxes, insurance, mortgage, child support, rent, legal fees. All this dignified blundering costs plenty. -- Saul Bellow
There is no old age of the soul. -- Saul Bellow
I labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want. -- Saul Bellow
There's the big advantage of backwardness. By the time the latest ideas reach Chicago, they're worn thin and easy to see through. You don't have to bother with them and it saves lots of trouble. -- Saul Bellow
Oh yes, I got up on my hindlegs like an orator and sounded off to everyone. -- Saul Bellow
An era of turmoil and ideological confusion, the principal phenomenon of the present age. -- Saul Bellow
Alternatives, and particularly desirable alternatives, grow only on imaginary trees. -- Saul Bellow
Unfortunately for the betterment of mankind it is not always the fair-minded who are in the right. -- Saul Bellow
I would never make a lion, I knew that; but I might pick up a small gain here and there in the attempt. -- Saul Bellow
A man may say, "From now on I'm going to speak the truth." But the truth hears him and runs away and hides before he's even done speaking. -- Saul Bellow
As the victim of those impulses she must be looking in the paper for his obituary. -- Saul Bellow
Strict seriousness was far more dangerous than any joke. -- Saul Bellow
It is a joy to be choked with thought. -- Saul Bellow
Human character is smaller now, people don't have durable passions; they've replaced passions with excitement. -- Saul Bellow
I don't actually take much stock in the collapsing culture bit. I'm beginning to see it instead as the conduct of life without input from your soul. -- Saul Bellow
But then why shouldn't he write the dead? He lived with them as much as with the living - perhaps more; and besides, his letters to the living were increasingly mental, and anyway, to the Unconscious, what was death? Dreams did not recognize it. -- Saul Bellow
I may well be a flop at this line of endeavor. Columbus too thought he was a flop, probably, when they sent him back in chains. Which didn't prove there was no America. -- Saul Bellow
How could I be anything but a dissenter? Who wants the opinion of a group? -- Saul Bellow
I've never turned over a fig leaf yet that didn't have a price tag on the other side. -- Saul Bellow
All at once he was aware that his angry spirit had stolen forth again and he was about to write letters. -- Saul Bellow
He thought for a while of Mithradates, whose system learned to thrive on poison. He cheated assassins, who made the mistake of using small doses, and was pickled, not destroyed.
Tutto fa brodo. -- Saul Bellow
The more realistic you are the more you threaten the grounds of your own art. -- Saul Bellow
The writer cannot make the seas of distraction stand still, but he [or she] can at times come between the madly distracted and the distractions. -- Saul Bellow
I've discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, To hell with you. -- Saul Bellow
My God! Who is this creature? It considers itself human. -- Saul Bellow
Was she not so simple and free of ulterior motives as she looked? Well, neither was I. -- Saul Bellow
Is love supposed to ruin you? It seems to me you shouldn't destroy yourself out of life for purposes of love
or what good is it? -- Saul Bellow
The sun of that chilishness goes on shining even when the larger bodies of hotter stars have risen to smelt you and cover you with their influence. The recenter stars may be more critical, more in the eye, but that earlier sun still remains a long time. -- Saul Bellow
I am much better now at ambiguities. -- Saul Bellow
But i am a prisoner of perception, a compulsory witness. -- Saul Bellow
The spirit knows that its growth is the real aim of existence. -- Saul Bellow
I think that New York is not the cultural centre of America, but the business and administrative centre of American culture. -- Saul Bellow
A fellow can't predict what he will pick up in the form of influence. -- Saul Bellow
And where was that day? Past and dead. Whose humiliating memories were these? His and not his father's. What had he to think back on that he could call good? Very, very little. You had to forgive. First, to forgive yourself, and then, general forgiveness. -- Saul Bellow
It's usually the selfish people who are loved the most. They do what you deny yourself, and you love them for it. You give them your heart. -- Saul Bellow
California is like an artificial limb the rest of the country doesn't really need. You can quote me on that. -- Saul Bellow
I am a more disinterested Ginsberg admirer than Eddie is. Eddie, so to speak, comes to the table with a croupier's rake. He works for the house. He skims from poetry. -- Saul Bellow
We mustn't forget how quickly the visions of genius become the canned goods of intellectuals. -- Saul Bellow
Facts always are sensational. -- Saul Bellow
O Lord! he concluded, forgive all these trespasses. Lead me not into Penn Station. -- Saul Bellow
There is no limit to the amount of intelligence invested in ignorance when the need for illusion runs deep. -- Saul Bellow
There is simply too much to think about. -- Saul Bellow
A plan relieves you of the torment of choice. -- Saul Bellow
It never seems to occur to such "criminals" that to behave with decency to another human being might also be "gratuitous. -- Saul Bellow
Chaos doesn't run the whole show. -- Saul Bellow
I don't know how it all at once came to me to talk a lot, tell jokes, kick up, and suddenly have views. When it was time to have them, there was no telling how I picked them from the air. -- Saul Bellow
Sentiment and brutality, never one without the other, like fossils and oil. -- Saul Bellow
Apes in their own habitat are less sexually driven than those in captivity. It must be that captivity, boredom, breeds lustfulness. -- Saul Bellow
Only self-hatred could lead him to ruin himself because his heart was broken. -- Saul Bellow
Of course! Easily or not at all. People were mad to be knocking themselves out over difficulties because they thought difficulty was a sign of the right thing. -- Saul Bellow
I had yet to find out how little people want you to succeed in an extraordinary project, and what comfort some have that the negligible is upheld and all other greater efforts falls on its face. -- Saul Bellow
He didn't ask "Where will you spend eternity?" as religious the-end-is-near picketers did but rather, "With what, in this modern democracy, will you meet the demands of your soul? -- Saul Bellow
What this means is not a single Tower of Babel plotted in common, but hundreds of thousands of separate beginnings, the length and breadth of America. Energetic people who build against pains and uncertainties, as weaker ones merely hope against them. -- Saul Bellow
A good American makes propaganda for whatever existence has forced him to become. -- Saul Bellow
Is our species crazy? Plenty of evidence. -- Saul Bellow
Certain blood will be given for half certain reasons, as in all wars. -- Saul Bellow
I am more stupid about some things than others; not equally stupid in all directions; I am not a well-rounded person. -- Saul Bellow
In expressing love we belong among the undeveloped countries. -- Saul Bellow
Boredom is the conviction that you can't change ... the shriek of unused capacities. -- Saul Bellow
Each man has his own batch of poems. -- Saul Bellow
So things go on as before with those who think a great deal and effect nothing, and those who think nothing evidently doing it all... -- Saul Bellow
The real and essential question is one of our employment by other human beings and their employment by us. -- Saul Bellow
Unless you made your life a turning point, there was no reason for existing. -- Saul Bellow
First these people murdered you, then they forced you to brood over their crimes. -- Saul Bellow
The noise of the world is so terrible that we can endure it only by being coated with sleep. -- Saul Bellow
Sometimes I wished I could become a shoemaker too. -- Saul Bellow
Love is the most potent cosmetic ... -- Saul Bellow
It's no disgrace to be a private, you know. Socrates was a plain foot soldier, a hoplite. -- Saul Bellow
The dream of man's heart ... is that life may complete in significant pattern. -- Saul Bellow
But she's a nut, and nuts win. -- Saul Bellow
I pretended not to understand. One of life's hardest jobs, to make a quick understanding slow. I think I succeeded, thought Herzog. -- Saul Bellow
Every treasure is guarded by dragons. That's how you can tell it's valuable. -- Saul Bellow
It is wrong to turn a man (a subject) into a thing (an object). By means of spiritual dialogue, the I-It relationship becomes an I-Thou relationship. God comes and goes in man's soul. And men come and go in each other's souls. Sometimes they come and go in each other's beds, too. -- Saul Bellow
Whatever the man's age, history, condition, knowledge, culture, development, he had an erection. Good currency anywhere. Recognized by the Bank of England. -- Saul Bellow
How should I know why! I didn't invent human beings, Iggy. -- Saul Bellow
I got in and started the engine, also turning on the radio. When the music began I wished that there might be more switches to turn on, for it was somehow not enough. -- Saul Bellow
Some people, if they didn't make it hard for themselves, might fall asleep. -- Saul Bellow
Also, he was smoking a cigar, and when a man is smoking a cigar, wearing a hat, he has an advantage; it is harder to find out how he feels. -- Saul Bellow
I always suspected of him that he had in some fashion discovered that there were ways in which to be human was unutterably dismal, and that all his life was given over to avoiding those ways. -- Saul Bellow
When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice -- Saul Bellow
When the striving ceases, there is life waiting as a gift. -- Saul Bellow
Art
the fresh feeling, new harmony, the transforming magic which by means of myth brings back the scattered distracted soul from its modern chaos
art, not politics, is the remedy. -- Saul Bellow
I am a phoenix who runs after arsonists. -- Saul Bellow
With a novelist, like a surgeon, you have to get a feeling that you've fallen into good hands - someone from whom you can accept the anesthetic with confidence. -- Saul Bellow
As long as I could keep improving my mind, I figured, I was doing okay. -- Saul Bellow
It seems, after all that there are no nonpeculiar people. -- Saul Bellow
Well, everybody has a history. -- Saul Bellow
Her hips were long and narrow, her bust was large, and she wore close-fitting skirts and sweaters and high heels that gave a tight arch of impatience to the muscles of her calves; her step was small and pretty and her laughter violent, total, and critical. -- Saul Bellow
A man should be able to hear, and to bear, the worst that could be said of him. -- Saul Bellow
I've had all the monstrosity I want. -- Saul Bellow
You do all you can to humanize and familiarize the world, and suddenly it becomes more strange than ever. The living are not what they were, the dead die again and again, and at last for good. -- Saul Bellow
At moments I dislike having a face, a nose, lips, because he has them. -- Saul Bellow
I seem to have the blind self-acceptance of the eccentric who can't conceive that his eccentricities are not clearly understood. -- Saul Bellow
A writer is in the broadest sense a spokesman of his community. Through him that community comes to know its heart. Without such knowledge, how long can it survive? -- Saul Bellow
Instead I often felt unusually light and swift-paced, as if I were on a weightless bicycle and sprinting through the star world. -- Saul Bellow
You can know a man by his devils and the way he gives hurts. -- Saul Bellow
But I was afraid I'd have to give up on an ideal explanation of her past life. Oh well, there didn't have to be one necessarily. -- Saul Bellow
...and suffering is another bad habit. -- Saul Bellow
And I dreamed down at the clouds, and thought that when I was a kid I had dreamed up at them, and having dreamed at the clouds from both sides as no other generation of men has done, one should be able to accept his death very easily. -- Saul Bellow
I love solitude but I prize it most when company is available. -- Saul Bellow
It is my childish mind that thinks people are ready to give it just because you need it. -- Saul Bellow
Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is. -- Saul Bellow
Myself is thus and so, and will continue thus and so. And why fight it? My balance comes from instability. -- Saul Bellow
I discovered, however, in the early days of our marriage that, in having her way, she put my interests ahead of her own. -- Saul Bellow
I guess nothing restrains people from demanding ideal conditions. Very little restrains them from anything. -- Saul Bellow
The revolutions of the twentieth century, the liberation of the masses by production, created private life but gave nothing to fill it with. -- Saul Bellow
People don't realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature. -- Saul Bellow
A good man can bear to listen to another talk about himself. -- Saul Bellow
In an age of madness, to expect to be untouched by madness is a form of madness. But the pursuit of sanity can be a form of madness, too -- Saul Bellow
To tell the truth I never had it so good. But I lacked the strength of character to bear such joy. -- Saul Bellow
A person either creates or destroys. There is no neutrality. -- Saul Bellow
God may save all, but human rescue is only for a few. -- Saul Bellow
What do women really want? They eat green salad and drink human blood. -- Saul Bellow
