Saul Bellow Quotes
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Hapiness can only be found if you can free yourself of all other distractions.
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Goodness is achieved not in a vacuum, but in the company of other men, attended by love.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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Facts always are sensational.
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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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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?
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... a fellow can't predict what he will pick up in the form of influence.
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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.
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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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Strict seriousness was far more dangerous than any joke.
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Alternatives, and particularly desirable alternatives, grow only on imaginary trees.
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My face too blind, my mind too limited, my instincts too narrow. But this intensity, doesn't it mean anything?
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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.
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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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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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...there is no old age of the soul.
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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.
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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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Myself is thus and so, and will continue thus and so. And why fight it? My balance comes from instability.
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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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I don't know exactly how it's done. I let it alone a good deal.