Saul Bellow Quotes
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Myself is thus and so, and will continue thus and so. And why fight it? My balance comes from instability.
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...there is no old age of the soul.
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... a fellow can't predict what he will pick up in the form of influence.
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It's no disgrace to be a private, you know. Socrates was a plain foot soldier, a hoplite.
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I am more stupid about some things than others; not equally stupid in all directions; I am not a well-rounded person.
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Any artist should be grateful for a naive grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.
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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.
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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?
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I think that New York is not the cultural centre of America, but the business and administrative centre of American culture.
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Alternatives, and particularly desirable alternatives, grow only on imaginary trees.
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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.
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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.
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All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.
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Writers are greatly respected. The intelligent public is wonderfully patient with them, continues to read them, and endures disappointment after disappointment, waiting to hear from art what it does not hear from theology, philosophy, social theory, and what it cannot hear from pure science. Out of the struggle at the center has come 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.
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She's very pretty but she's honey from the icebox, if you know what I mean. Cold sweets won't spread.
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Facts always are sensational.
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The secret motive of the absent-minded is to be innocent while guilty. Absent-mindedness is spurious innocence.
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There is much to be said for exotic marriages. If your husband is a bore, it takes years longer to discover.
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Fun comes hard - like, alas, its prarens, pleasure and happiness, whom we have to pursue.
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But there are things you can't consult anybody about.
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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.
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You have, like the external world, your own phenomena inside.
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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!
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But she's a nut, and nuts win.