Saul Bellow Quotes
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I must play the instrument I've got.
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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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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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And I'm convinced that knowing the names of things braces people up.
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And I said to myself that unless you conceive Death to be a violent guerrilla and kidnaper who snatches those you love, and if you are not cowardly and cannot submit to such terrorism as civilized people now do in every department of life, you must pursue and inquire and explore every possibility and seek everywhere and try everything.
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Death deserves dignity.
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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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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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Unless you're completely exploded, there's always something to be grateful for.
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...chaos doesn't run the whole show.
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You're all alone when you're a writer. Sometimes you just feel you need a humanity bath. Even a ride on the subway will do that. But it's much more interesting to talk about books. After all, that's what life used to be for writers: they talk books, politics, history, America. Nothing has replaced that.
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There is simply too much to think about.
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The dream of man's heart ... is that life may complete in significant pattern.
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It's goodbye to reality when love sets in.
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At moments I dislike having a face, a nose, lips, because he has them.
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The best and purest human beings, from the beginning of time, have understood that life is sacred.
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I'm glad I haven't lived in vain.
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The challenge of modern freedom, or the combination of isolation and freedom which confronts you, is to make yourself up. The danger is that you may emerge from the process as a not-entirely-human creature. (Referenced in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People by Toby Young)
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Art attempts to find in the universe, in matter as well as in the facts of life, what is fundamental, enduring, essential.
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I don’t actually take much stock in the collapsing culture bit. I’m beginning to see it instead as the conduct of life without input from your soul.
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How should I know why! I didn't invent human beings, Iggy.
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Fidelity is for phonographs
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Can we find nothing good to say about TV? Well, yes, it brings scattered solitaries into a sort of communion. TV allows your isolated American to think that he participates in the life of the entire country. It does not actually place him in a community, but his heart is warmed with the suggestion (on the whole false) that there is a community somewhere in the vicinity and that his atomized consciousness will be drawn back toward the whole.
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A man may say, "From now on I'm going to speak the truth." But the truth hears him and runs away and hides before he's even done speaking.