Quotes
- "A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep."
— Saul Bellow - "A human soul devoid of longing was a soul deformed, deprived of its highest good, sick unto death."
— Saul Bellow, Ravelstein - "A man is only as good as what he loves."
— Saul Bellow - "A writer is a reader moved to emulation."
— 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, Henderson the Rain King - "And now here's the thing. It takes a time like this for you to find out how sore your heart has been, and, moreover, all the while you thought you were going around
idle terribly hard work was taking place. Hard, hard work, excavation and digging, mining, moiling through tunnels, heaving, pushing, moving rock, working, working, working, working, panting, hauling, hoisting."
— Saul Bellow, All Marbles Accounted for - "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."
— 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 (Humboldt's Gift) - "Boredom is the shriek of unused capacities."
— 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, Seize the Day - "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."
— Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March - "Conquered people tend to be witty."
— Saul Bellow - "Every other man spoke a language entirely his own, which he had figured out by private thinking; he had his own ideas and peculiar ways. If you wanted to talk about a glass of water, you had to start back with God creating the heavens and earth; the apple; Abraham; Moses and Jesus; Rome; the Middle Ages; gunpowder; the Revolution; back to Newton; up to Einstein; then war and Lenin and Hitler. After reviewing this and getting it all straight again you could proceed to talk about a glass of water."
— Saul Bellow, Seize the Day - "Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door."
— Saul Bellow - "Everyone tries to create a world he can live in, and what he can't use he often can't see. But the real world is already created, and if your fabrication doesn't correspond, then even if you feel noble and insist on there being something better than what people call reality, that better something needn't try to exceed what, in its actuality, since we know it so little, may be very surprising. If a happy state of things, surprising; if miserable or tragic, no worse than what we invent."
— Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March - "Guys like you make life easy for some women."
— Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March - "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."
— Saul Bellow, Seize the Day - "I am a phoenix who runs after arsonists."
— 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, Henderson the Rain King
- "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, Henderson the Rain King - "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, A Theft - "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 - "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. Faster, much faster than any man could make the tally."
— Saul Bellow, Seize the Day
