Quotes from Saul Bellow

Fantasia, fantasia, fantasia. Si trasforma in realtà. Essa sorregge, essa altera, essa redime!

Mimi didn't care about secrecy. She led a proclaimed life, and once she got talking she held back nothing.

Apes in their own habitat are less sexually driven than those in captivity. It must be that captivity, boredom, breeds lustfulness.

I guess nothing restrains people from demanding ideal conditions. Very little restrains them from anything.

As the victim of those impulses she must be looking in the paper for his obituary.

He had come into a view of mutability, and I too could see that one is only ostensibly born to remain in specified limits.

But Mimi- her tenderness didn't have an easy visibility. You wondered what it would be, and after what terrible manifestations it would appear.

Still women- women. They do themselves more credit, there's more reality in women. They live closer to their nature. They have to. It's more with them. They have the breasts. They see their blood, and it does them good, while men are led to be vainer.

What use was war without also love?

Was she not so simple and free of ulterior motives as she looked? Well, neither was I.

We took the coal-and-ice dealers into taverns and drank beer and swapped talk, in those sleepy and dark with heat joints where the very flies crept rather than flew, seeming doped by the urinal camphors and malt sourness, and from the heated emptiness and woodblock-knocking of the baseball broadcast that gave only more constriction to the unlocatable, undiagnosed wrong.

At times I feel like a socket that remembers its tooth.

I still had the craving that I had given in to all summer long when I had lived on books, to have the reach to grasp both ends of the frame and turn the big image-taking glass to any scene of the world.

You do all you can to humanize and familiarize the world, and suddenly it becomes more strange than ever. The living are not what they were, the dead die again and again, and at last for good.

Did I say that the world had never had better color? I left something out of account, a limping, crippled consideration which seems to lose ground as you reach beauty and Orizaba flowers, but soon you find it has preceded you.

More of fear than of any other thing has been created.

I am not an ornithologist—I am a bird.

No true individual has existed yet, able to live, able to die. Only diseased, tragic, or dismal and ludicrous fools who sometimes hoped to achieve some ideal by fiat, by their great desire for it. But usually by bullying all mankind into believing them.

IF THE GREAT ANDROMEDA GALAXY had to depend on you to hold it up, where would it be now but fallen way to hell?

It's no small matter to become rich and famous by saying exactly what you think — to say it in your own words, without compromise.

Who controls everything? Old men of this type. Without needs. They don't need therefore they have. I need, therefore I don't have.

And where was that day? Past and dead. Whose humiliating memories were these? His and not his father's. What had he to think back on that he could call good? Very, very little. You had to forgive. First, to forgive yourself, and then, general forgiveness.

But enough of that--here I am. Hineni! How marvelously beautiful it is today. He stopped in the overgrown yard, shut his eyes in the sun, against flashes of crimson, and drew in the odors of catalpa-bells, soil, honeysuckle, wild onions, and herbs.

Some people, if they didn't make it hard for themselves, might fall asleep," said Mintouchian. "Even the Son of Man made it hard so He would have enough in common with our race to be its God.