Saul Bellow quotes:

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  • 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.

  • 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.

  • I've never turned over a fig leaf yet that didn't have a price tag on the other side.

  • A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.

  • Whoever wants to reach a distant goal must take small steps.

  • I think that New York is not the cultural centre of America, but the business and administrative centre of American culture.

  • When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice.

  • Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.

  • There are evils that have the ability to survive identification and go on for ever... money, for instance, or war.

  • A fool can throw a stone in a pond that 100 wise men can not get out.

  • The secret motive of the absent-minded is to be innocent while guilty. Absent-mindedness is spurious innocence.

  • California is like an artificial limb the rest of the country doesn't really need. You can quote me on that.

  • No realistic, sane person goes around Chicago without protection.

  • She was what we used to call a suicide blonde - dyed by her own hand.

  • In expressing love we belong among the undeveloped countries.

  • What is art but a way of seeing?

  • Happiness can only be found if you can free yourself of all other distractions.

  • 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.

  • Our society, like decadent Rome, has turned into an amusement society, with writers chief among the court jesters

  • Humankind struggles with collective powers for its freedom, the individual struggles with dehumanization for the possession of his soul.

  • A good novel is worth more then the best scientific study.

  • 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."

  • All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.

  • I am a phoenix who runs after arsonists.

  • But there are things you can't consult anybody about.

  • Any artist should be grateful for a naive grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

  • 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."

  • 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."

  • If you could have confidence in nature you would not have to fear. It would keep you up. Creative is nature. Rapid. Lavish. Inspirational. It shapes leaves. It rolls the waters of the earth. Man is the chief of this. All creations are his just inheritance. You don't know what you've got within you. A person either creates or he destroys. There is no neutrality."

  • 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."

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • From Euclid to Newton there were straight lines. The modern age analyzes the wavers.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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!

  • A man is only as good as what he loves.

  • Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.

  • Goodness is achieved not in a vacuum, but in the company of other men, attended by love.

  • Associate with the noblest people you can find; read the best books; live with the mighty; but learn to be happy alone.

  • A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

  • Alternatives, and particularly desirable alternatives, grow only on imaginary trees.

  • If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.

  • People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • He believed that he must, that he could and would recover the good things, the happy things, the easy tranquil things of life. He had made mistakes, but he could overlook these. He had been a fool, but that could be forgiven. The time wasted--must be relinquished. What else could one do about it? Things were too complex, but they might be reduced to simplicity again. Recovery was possible.

  • You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.

  • In the greatest confusion there is still an open channel to the soul. It may be difficult to find because by midlife it is overgrown, and some of the wildest thickets that surround it grow out of what we describe as our education. But the channel is always there, and it is our business to keep it open, to have access to the deepest part of ourselves.

  • It seems hard for the American people to believe that anything could be more exciting than the times themselves. What we read daily and view on the TV has thrust imagined forms into the shadow. We are staggeringly rich in facts, in things, and perhaps, like the nouveau riche of other ages, we want our wealth faithfully reproduced by the artist.

  • 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.

  • Fidelity is for phonographs

  • In here, the human bosom -- mine, yours, everybody's -- there isn't just one soul. There's a lot of souls. But there are two main ones, the real soul and a pretender soul. Now! Every man realizes that he has to love something or somebody. He feels that he must go outward. 'If thou canst not love, what art thou?' Are you with me?

  • The two real problems in life are boredom and death.

  • You can spend the entire second half of your life recovering from the mistakes of the first half.

  • 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.'

  • The main reason for rewriting is not to achieve a smooth surface, but to discover the inner truth of your characters.

  • I headed downtown right away. It was still early in the evening, glittering with electric, with ice; and trembling in the factories, those nearly all windows, over the prairies that had returned over demolitions with winter grass pricking the snow and thrashed and frozen together into beards by the wind. The cold simmer of the lake also, blue; the steady skating of rails too, down to the dark.

  • 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.

  • One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.

  • The Indian temperament is so excitable, you know.

  • 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?

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • The old continued to have one resurgence of foolishness after another, until the organism gave out altogether.

  • With one long breath, caught and held in his chest, he fought his sadness over his solitary life. Don't cry, you idiot! Live or die, but don't poison everything...

  • What do women really want? They eat green salad and drink human blood.

  • It's hard for writers to get on with their work if they are convinced that they owe a concrete debt to experience and cannot allow themselves the privilege of ranging freely through social classes and professional specialties. A certain pride in their own experience, perhaps a sense of the property rights of others in their experience, holds them back.

  • 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.

  • A man should be able to hear, and to bear, the worst that could be said of him.

  • 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.

  • 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)

  • The first undressing of two lovers is a most special event.

  • A millennial belief in a Holy God may have the effect of deepening the soul, but it is also obviously archaic, and modern influences would presently bring me up to date and reveal how antiquated my origins were. To turn away from those origins, however, has always seemed to me an utter impossibility. It would be a treason to my first consciousness to un-Jew myself.

  • I am more stupid about some things than others; not equally stupid in all directions; I am not a well-rounded person.

  • (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.

  • ... a fellow can't predict what he will pick up in the form of influence.

  • ... an era of turmoil and ideological confusion, the principal phenomenon of the present age.

  • ... unless you made your life a turning point, there was no reason for existing.

  • ...America didn't have to fight scarcity and we all felt guilty before people who still had to struggle for bread and freedom in the old way ... We weren't starving, we weren't bugged by the police, locked up in madhouses for our ideas, arrested, deported, slave laborers sent to die in concentration camps. We were spared the holocausts and nights of terror. With our advantages we should be formulating the new basic questions for mankind. But instead we sleep. Just sleep and sleep, and eat and play and fuss and sleep again.

  • ...chaos doesn't run the whole show.

  • ...I am much better now at ambiguities.

  • ...is the carbon molecule lined with thought?

  • ...there is no old age of the soul.

  • A human soul devoid of longing was a soul deformed, deprived of its highest good, sick unto death.

  • A man must have limits and cannot give in to the wild desires to be everything and everyone and everything to everyone.

  • A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life. It tells us that for every human being there is a diversity of existences, that the single existence is itself an illusion in part, that these many existences signify something, tend to something, fulfill something; it promises us meaning, harmony, and even justice.

  • A person either creates or destroys. There is no neutrality.

  • A plan relieves you of the torment of choice.

  • A writer is a reader moved to emulation.

  • 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?

  • 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.

  • Americans must be the most sententious people in history. Far too busy to be religious, they have always felt that they sorely needed guidance.

  • 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.

  • And I said to myself that unless you conceive Death to be a violent guerrilla and kidnaper who snatches those you love, and if you are not cowardly and cannot submit to such terrorism as civilized people now do in every department of life, you must pursue and inquire and explore every possibility and seek everywhere and try everything.

  • And I'm convinced that knowing the names of things braces people up.

  • And what about all the good I have in my heart - does it mean anything?

  • Anxiety destroys scale, and suffering makes us lose perspective.

  • 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.

  • Art attempts to find in the universe, in matter as well as in the facts of life, what is fundamental, enduring, essential.

  • Art has to do with the arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.

  • Art is order, made out of the chaos of life.

  • As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

  • At moments I dislike having a face, a nose, lips, because he has them.

  • Because I have become such a solitary, and not in the Aristotelian sense: not a beast, not a god. Rather, a loner troubled by longings, incapable of finding a suitable language and despairing at the impossibility of composing messages in a playable key--as if I no longer understood the codes used by the estimable people who wanted to hear from me and would have so much to reply if only the impediments were taken away.

  • 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.

  • Boredom is the conviction that you can't change ... the shriek of unused capacities.

  • Brother raises a hand against brother and son against father (how terrible!) and the father also against son. And moreover it is a continuity-matter, for if the father did not strike the son, they would not be alike. It is done to perpetuate similarity. Oh, Henderson, man cannot keep still under the blows.... A hit B? B hit C?--we have not enough alphabet to cover the condition. A brave man will try to make the evil stop with him. He shall keep the blow. No man shall get it from him, and that is a sublime ambition.

  • But a man's character is his fate... and in the end there isn't any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.

  • But privately when things got very bad I often looked into books to see whether I could find some helpful words, and one day I read, "The forgiveness of sins is perpetual and righteousness first is not required." This impressed me so deeply that I went around saying it to myself. But then I forgot which book it was.

  • But she's a nut, and nuts win.

  • Can we find nothing good to say about TV? Well, yes, it brings scattered solitaries into a sort of communion. TV allows your isolated American to think that he participates in the life of the entire country. It does not actually place him in a community, but his heart is warmed with the suggestion (on the whole false) that there is a community somewhere in the vicinity and that his atomized consciousness will be drawn back toward the whole.

  • Certain blood will be given for half certain reasons, as in all wars.

  • Conquered people tend to be witty.

  • De Tocqueville considered the impulse toward well-being as one of the strongest impulses of a democratic society. He can't be blamed for underestimating the destructive powers generated by this same impulse.

  • Death deserves dignity.

  • Death is the black backing on the mirror that allows us to see anything at all.

  • Death is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything

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