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It would not be practical for her to hate herself. Luckily, God sends a substitute, a husband.
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
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It is sometimes necessary to repeat what all know. All mapmakers should place the Mississippi in the same location and avoid originality.
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 -
We take foreigners to be incomplete Americans -- convinced that we must help and hasten their evolution.
Saul Bellow -
I've never turned over a fig leaf yet that didn't have a price tag on the other side.
Saul Bellow -
Myself is thus and so, and will continue thus and so. And why fight it? My balance comes from instability.
Saul Bellow -
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.
Saul Bellow
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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 -
Hapiness can only be found if you can free yourself of all other distractions.
Saul Bellow -
Each man has his own batch of poems.
Saul Bellow -
I’ve had all the monstrosity I want.
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 -
Towards the end of your life you have something like a pain schedule to fill out - a long schedule like a federal document, only it's your pain schedule. Endless categories. First, physical causes - like arthritis, gallstones, menstrual cramps. New category, injured vanity, betrayal, swindle, injustice. But the hardest items of all have to do with love. The question then is: So why does everybody persist? If love cuts them up so much.
Saul Bellow
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Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.
Saul Bellow -
Goodness is achieved not in a vacuum, but in the company of other men, attended by love.
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 -
I think that New York is not the cultural centre of America, but the business and administrative centre of American culture.
Saul Bellow -
...there is no old age of the soul.
Saul Bellow -
Strict seriousness was far more dangerous than any joke.
Saul Bellow
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I see that I've become a really bad correspondent. It's not that I don't think of you. You come into my thoughts often. But when you do it appears to me that I owe you a particularly grand letter. And so you end in the "warehouse of good intentions": "Can't do it now." "Then put it on hold." This is one's strategy for coping with old age, and with death--because one can't die with so many obligations in storage. Our clever species, so fertile and resourceful in denying its weaknesses.
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 -
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 -
I am more stupid about some things than others; not equally stupid in all directions; I am not a well-rounded person.
Saul Bellow