Quotes from Saul Bellow

Nada es negro donde luce el sol y el único sitio en que se ve negro es donde no brilla el sol. Lo que la gente de color necesitamos es ser ricos. No hay otra solución.

I may be old enough for my second childhood, but at least the first is well behind me.

He tried to make his lust comical, to show how absurd it all was, easily the most wretched form of human struggle, the very essence of slavery.

yourself." "Yes," I agreed. "It has a specific kind of satisfaction, the bad of it guarantees it as real experience. This is what we go through, and it's what existence is like. The brain is a mirror and reflects the world.

He was a splendid old man, only partly fraudulent, and what more can you ask of anyone?

True. All too true. I have never been at home in life. All my decay has taken place upon a child.

Search me, I said. I'm a city boy myself. They must be crocuses.

But what about justice?—Justice! Look who wants justice! Most of mankind has lived and died without—totally without it. People by the billions and for ages sweated, gypped, enslaved, suffocated, bled to death, buried with no more justice than cattle.

I had yet to find out how little people want you to succeed in an extraordinary project, and what comfort some have that the negligible is upheld and all other greater efforts falls on its face.

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.

From Soloviëv, Mady naturally turned to Berdyaev, and while speaking of Slavery and Freedom—the concept of Sobornost—she opened the jar of pickled herring.

In every community there is a class of people profoundly dangerous to the rest. I don't mean the criminals. For them we have punitive sanctions. I mean the leaders. Invariably the most dangerous people seek the power. While

Unrequited love. Nowadays called hysterical dependency.

An old man, disappointed, of failing strength, may try to reinvigorate himself by means of anger.

But we mustn't forget how quickly the visions of genius become the canned goods of the intellectuals.

the cant and rant of pipsqueaks about Inauthenticity and Forlornness.

The good are attracted by men's perceptions and think not for themselves. You must cleanse the gates of vision by self-knowledge, by experience. Besides which, opposition is true friendship.

began to learn from her was of the utmost importance; namely, that everyone sees to it his fate is shared. Or tries

if you must be pitiable, sue for aid and succor, you will put yourself always, inevitably, in the hands of these angry spirits. Blasting you with their "truth.

We are survivors, in this age, so theories of progress ill become us, because we are intimately acquainted with the costs. To realize that you are a survivor is a shock.

His intellect would have been more effective if he had had an aggressive paranoid character, eager for power. He was jealous but not exceptionally competitive, not a true paranoiac.

That was nothing to get excited about, as it was one of the commoner human experiences—neither to give a damn nor be given a damn about.

In every direction, the walls of life are tiled with such facts so that you can never account for them all, only note some of the more conspicuous ones.

Unified by the horrible wars, instructed in our brutal stupidity by revolutions, by engineered famines directed by "ideologists" (heirs of Marx and Hegel and trained in the cunning of reason), perhaps we, modern humankind (can it be!), have done the nearly impossible, namely, learned something.