Quotes from Saul Bellow

The good die young, but I have been spared to build myself up so that I may end my life as good as gold. The senior dead will be proud of me.... I will join the Y.M.C.A. of the immortals. Only, in this very hour, I may be missing eternity.

Even worse is the discovery that one has been living out certain greeting-card sentiments, with ribbons of middle-class virtue tied in a bow around one's heart.

don't marry suffering. Some people do. They get married to it, and sleep and eat together, just as husband and wife. If they go with joy they think it's adultery. Yes, thought Wilhelm, suffering is the only kind of life they are sure they can have, and if they quit suffering they're afraid they'll have nothing.

As the wicked flee when none pursueth, so does the middle-class wrestle when none contendeth. They cried out for freedom, it came down on them in a flood. Nothing remains but a few floating timbers of psychotherapy.

But it's a tiresome preoccupation, self-esteem. Something has to be done to limit the number of people whose opinions can affect us.

Some men seem to know exactly where their opportunities lie; they break prisons and cross whole Siberias to pursue them. One room holds me.

The earth was a grave: our life was lent to it by its elements and had to be returned: a time came when the simple elements seemed to long for release from the complicated forms of life, when every element of every cell said, Enough! The planet was our mother and our burial ground. No wonder the human spirit wished to leave. Leave this prolific belly. Leave also this great tomb. Passion for the infinite caused by the terror, by timor mortis, needed material appeasement.

Thoughts should be real. Words should have a definite meanings and a man should believe what he said.

Mine was the sort of heart that had to overcome melancholy and free itself from many depressing weights.

I may well be a flop at this line of endeavor. Columbus too thought he was a flop, probably, when they sent him back in chains. Which didn't prove there was no America.

One of life's hardest jobs, to make a quick understanding slow.

The revolutions of the twentieth century, the liberation of the masses by production, created private life but gave nothing to fill it with.

The sand swallows burst out of their scupper holes in the bluffs and out over the transparent drown of the water, back again to the white, to the brown, to the black, from moving to stock-still sand waves and water-worked woods and roots that hugged and twisted in the sun.

Odd that mankind's benefactors should be amusing people. In America at least this is often the case. Anyone who wants to govern the country has to entertain

To know how it feels to be a seaweed you have to get in the water.

Io? Io amo la vecchia troia così com'è e mi piace pensare di esser pronto ad accogliere anche il peggio che essa abbia da offrirmi. Io veramente adoro la vita, e se non posso raggiungerla in faccia, lascio andare il mio bacio un poco più in basso.

There's the big advantage of backwardness. By the time the latest ideas reach Chicago, they're worn thin and easy to see through. You don't have to bother with them and it saves lots of trouble.

Everybody is busy. Every man turns himself into a whole corporation to handle the business.

Atostogos suteiks man nauj? j?g? gr?žti prie savo neurasteniško gyvenimo.

To accept too many favors from Ramona was dangerous. He might have to pay with his freedom. Of course he didn't need that freedom now; he needed a rest. Still, after resting, he might want his freedom again. He wasn't sure of that, either. But it was a possibility.

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul!

My balance comes from instability.

So many questions impossible to answer could not be asked about an honest man. Nor perhaps about a sane man.

You had to talk with yourself in the daytime and reason with yourself at night. Who else was there to talk to in a city like New York?