Quotes from Saul Bellow

My next idea was how nothing was more dreadful than to be forced by another to feel his persuasion as to how horrible it is to exist, how deathly to hope, and taste the same despair. How of all the impositions this was the worst imposition. Not just to be as they make you but to feel as they dictate. If you didn't have the strongest alliance you surely would despair at last and your mouth would drink blood.

All at once he was aware that his angry spirit had stolen forth again and he was about to write letters.

It hardly does much good to have a complex mind without actually being a philosopher.

I would as lief look upon a piece of pastrami-stained paper as on the face of Alfred Kazin.

Innately, the female knows how to cripple by sickening a man with guilt. It is a very special destruct, and she sends her curse to make a fellow impotent.

If a man disliked you, he would dislike you for all the reasons he could think of.

Her hips were long and narrow, her bust was large, and she wore close-fitting skirts and sweaters and high heels that gave a tight arch of impatience to the muscles of her calves; her step was small and pretty and her laughter violent, total, and critical.

I'm deprived of my children." Wilhelm bit his lip. It was too late to turn away. The anguish struck him. "I pay and pay. I never see them. They grow up without me. She makes them like herself. She'll bring them up to be my enemies

But what if you get nailed?" He said, "I'll explain how I feel about it. You see, I don't have larceny in my heart; I'm not a real crook. I'm not interested in it, so nobody can make a fate of it for me. That's not my fate. I might get into a little trouble, but I never would let them make it my trouble, get it?" I

There's nothing worse than being confused, too, in addition to being unlucky.

Those are the only two classes of people there are. Some want to live, but the great majority don't.

History, memory - that is what makes us human, that, and our knowledge of death: 'by man came death'. For knowledge of death makes us wish to extend our lives at the expense of others. And this is the root of the struggle for power.

I believe Uncle's intuition to have been that plants functioned as sense organs, collecting cosmic data for the earth itself.

Of course! Easily or not at all. People were mad to be knocking themselves out over difficulties because they thought difficulty was a sign of the right thing.

Someone had said, and Wilhelm agreed with the saying, that in Los Angeles all the loose objects in the country were collected, as if America had been tilted and everything that wasn't tightly screwed down had slid into Southern California.

John Hawkes is an extraordinary writer. I have always admired his books. They should he more widely read.

If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.

Roumanian is an easy language. You just add a tl to everything.

Anyway, it was an age of spiritual exhaustion—all the old dreams were dreamed out. I was angry; I burned like that furnace; reading more, sick with rage.

Just then his state of being was so curious that he was compelled , himself, to see it -- eager, grieving, fantastic, dangerous, crazed and, to the point of death, comical. It was enough to make a man pray to God to remove this great, bone-breaking burden of selfhood and self-development, give himself, a failure, back to the species for a primitive cure.

La gente non fa le cose per cui ha un vero talento, ma quelle a cui la spinge la preoccupazione. Se sono bravi a riparare le automobili, devono cantare il Don Giovanni; se sanno cantare, devono fare l'architetto; e se hanno il bernoccolo dell'architettura, vogliono diventare ispettori scolastici o pittori astrattisti o qualunque altra cosa. QUALUNQUE COSA!

I might have added, as it entered my mind to do, that some people found satisfaction in being. Being. Others in becoming. Being people have all the breaks. Becoming people are very unlucky, always in a tizzy. The Becoming people are always have to make explanations or offer justifications of the Being people. While the Being people provoke these explanations.

omul fie creeaza,fie distruge..neutralitate nu exista..

Humankind is still fooling around with hypocrisy, I thought. They don't realize that it's too late even for that.