Quotes from Saul Bellow

Without teaching, Jewry was an impossibility.

A white December sky overly the Atlantic gloom. The message of Nature seemed to be that conditions were severe, that things were tough, very tough, and that people should console one another.

Well, you are a privileged character. You're the only man living whose mother lost her mind and died.

Izišao je iz stana svladavaju?i tugu zbog tog samotnog života. Prsni koš mu se raširio a grlo steglo. - Za ime božje, nemoj plakati, idiote jedan! Umri ili živi, ali nemoj sve zatrovati.

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.

am accustomed to being downgraded by businesspeople, lawyers, engineers, Washington hotshots, various scientists. Even their secretaries, who get their notions of what matters from television, hide their smiles behind their hands and give one another the high sign when I turn up—some incomprehensible goofball.

But I wasn't inclined to go out of my way to defer to so many critics. I had a good grasp of reality and of my defects. I permanently kept in mind the approach of Death, who might at any time loom up before you.

But I'm thinking of the great death populations of the Gulags and the German labor camps. Why does the century—I don't know how else to put it—underwrite so much destruction? There is a lameness that comes over all of us when we consider these facts.

Grielescu was a famous scholar, not exactly a follower of Jung—but not exactly not a Jungian. He was a hard one to place.

So deformity has overtaken love and love is a power that can't let us alone. It can't because we owe our existence to acts of love performed before us, because love is a standing debt of the soul.

I brought all this on myself by telling Ramona the story of my life – how I rose from humble origins to complete disaster. But a man who has made so many mistakes can't afford to ignore the corrections of his friends. Friends like Sandor, that humped rat. Or like Valentine, the moral megalomaniac and prophet in Israel. To all such, one is well advised to listen. Scolding is better than nothing. At least it's company.

Ravelstein, who didn't bring wild charges against anybody, said that Grielescu was mentioned, by scholars who specialized in such things, as an Iron Guardist connected with the Romanian prewar fascist government. He had been a foreign service cultural official in the Nazi regime in Bucharest. "You don't like to think of such things

Rubin, the man at the newsstand, had poor eyes. They may not have been actually weak but they were poor in expression, with lacy lids that furled down at the corners.

More than human, can you have any use for life? Less than human, you don't either.

Those jerks playing chevalier à votre service? Of course it's just a game. But the women get a kick

never could see what was so disgraceful about 'stiffening in a rented house,' as Eliot wrote. Do you croak better on your own property?

She has two husbands. Whose are the kids? The fellow detected her and she gave a signed confession that two of the four children were not the father's.

France, they have no life at home, home is disgusting, and they need to see themselves in a French light only. This applies to somebody like Cioran or even our friend—your friend—Grielescu. They hope to turn into Frenchmen. But your wife is even more peculiar . .

And I thought there was altogether too much of this to live with. Better forget it, in part. The Ganges is there with its demons and lords; but you have a right also, and merely, to wash your feet and do your personal laundry in it. Or even if you had a good car it would take more than a lifetime to do a tour of all the Calvaries.

You see, I understand what it is when the lonely person begins to feel like an animal.

But can thought wake you from the dream of existence? Not if it becomes a second realm of confusion, another more complicated dream, the dream of intellect, the delusion of total explanations.

And he makes all sorts of people feel that he has exactly what they've been looking for. Subtlety for the subtle. Warmth for the warm. For the crude, crudity. For the crooks, hypocrisy. Atrocity for the atrocious. Whatever your heart desires. Emotional plasma which can circulate in any system.

me for years that democrats take a low view of themselves, and are brought up to believe they're insignificant. But turn that around and you come out with megalomania, and we've seen plenty of examples of that too.

Compulsory veneration is bound to come out as rebellion, hatred, and blasphemy.