Saul Bellow Quotes
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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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Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.
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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 a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.
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Is our species crazy? Plenty of evidence.
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Boredom is the conviction that you can't change ... the shriek of unused capacities.
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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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There's a kind of emptiness at the center of life ... nothing to form your life on, or by.
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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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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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You have, like the external world, your own phenomena inside.
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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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The main reason for rewriting is not to achieve a smooth surface, but to discover the inner truth of your characters.
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Human character is smaller now, people don't have durable passions; they've replaced passions with excitement.
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But she's a nut, and nuts win.
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Art is order, made out of the chaos of life.
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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.
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Our society, like decadent Rome, has turned into an amusement society, with writers chief among the court jesters
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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.
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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.
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Associate with the noblest people you can find; read the best books; live with the mighty; but learn to be happy alone.
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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.
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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?