Saul Bellow Quotes
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But privately when things got very bad I often looked into books to see whether I could find some helpful words, and one day I read, "The forgiveness of sins is perpetual and righteousness first is not required." This impressed me so deeply that I went around saying it to myself. But then I forgot which book it was.
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A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
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It is a joy to be choked with thought.
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De Tocqueville considered the impulse toward well-being as one of the strongest impulses of a democratic society. He can't be blamed for underestimating the destructive powers generated by this same impulse.
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A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.
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The first undressing of two lovers is a most special event.
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The life of every citizen is becoming a business. This, it seems to me, is one of the worst interpretations of the meaning of human life history has ever seen. Man's life is not a business.
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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.
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A man must have limits and cannot give in to the wild desires to be everything and everyone and everything to everyone.
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When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice.
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Here we write well when we expose frauds and hypocrites. We are great at counting warts and blemishes and weighting feet of clay. In expressing love, we belong among the underdeveloped countries.
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Excuse me ... but I reject your definitions of me.
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I am an American – Chicago born.
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We are funny creatures. We don't see the stars as they are, so why do we love them? They are not small gold objects, but endless fire.
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The body, she says, is subject to the force of gravity. But the soul is ruled by levity, pure.
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It wasn't that he was specially ungenerous but that he put things off to give his generosity a longer and more significant route.
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Death is the black backing on the mirror that allows us to see anything at all.
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If I'm out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.
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With a novelist, like a surgeon, you have to get a feeling that you've fallen into good hands - someone from whom you can accept the anesthetic with confidence.
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Death deserves dignity.
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You have to fight for your life. That's the chief condition on which you hold it.
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And I'm convinced that knowing the names of things braces people up.
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For the first time in history, the human species as a whole has gone into politics. Everyone is in the act, and there is no telling what may come of it.
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A plan relieves you of the torment of choice.