Quotes from Saul Bellow

Yes, there are good reasons for revulsion and fear. But revulsion and fear impair judgment. Anxiety destroys scale, and suffering makes us lose perspective.

A bit of ideology and being up to date is most apropos," Chekhov said—tongue in cheek, I suspect. In a more serious vein, he wrote that writers "should engage in politics only enough to protect themselves from politics.

To have assumed, for instance, that the deterioration of language and its debasement was tantamount to dehumanization led straight to cultural fascism.

His friend, his former friend, Valentine, and his wife, his ex-wife Madeleine, had spread the rumor that his sanity had collapsed.

She wants to live in the delirious professions, as Valéry calls them—trades in which the main instrument is your opinion of yourself and the raw material is your reputation or standing.

The Dictator must have living crowds and also a crowd of corpses.

Dopo aver riflettuto a lungo, esitato, e lottato con se stesso, invariabilmente sceglieva la strada che innumerevoli volte aveva respinto. Una

The true soul is the one that pays the price. It suffers and gets sick, and it realizes that the pretender can't be loved.

Siguran sam da ste bili iskreni. Ne neiskreni. Prava neiskrenost rijetko se sre?e.

And truth is true only as it brings down more disgrace and dreariness upon human beings, so that if it shows anything except evil it is illusion, and not truth.

I was beginning to think that my bag was lost when I saw it wobbling, solitary, on the long, long line of rollers. It came towards me like an uncorseted woman sauntering over cobblestones.

Hearts quaking with cheap and feeble charity or oozing potato love have not written history.

Nema muškarca koji može zadovoljiti ženu koja ga ne?e - rekao je Herzog. - U redu, zar vam nije s tim odgovoreno?

Now: the first requirement of stability in a human being was that the said human being should really desire to exist. This is what Spinoza says.

Do you believe in transcendence downward as well as upward?

Fitness was not his cup of tea. He treated his body like a vehicle - a motorbike that he raced at top speed along the rim of the Grand Canyon.

No ha sido esa larga enfermedad -mi vida- sino esa larga convalecencia, también mi vida. La revisión liberal-burguesa, la ilusión del perfeccionamiento, el veneno de la esperanza.

Gratitude! I was deeply grateful. But the politic gratitude of weakness, of the sufferer, furious underneath.

I got a lawyer, and she got one, too, and both of them talk and send me bills, and I eat my heart out.

The lawyers—see?—draw up an agreement, and she says okay on Monday and wants more money on Tuesday. And it begins again.

She just has fixed herself on me to kill me. She can do it at long distance. One of these days I'll be struck down by suffocation or apoplexy because of her.

Not that long disease, my life, but that long convalescence, my life. The liberal-bourgeois revision, the illusion of improvement, the poison of hope.

Because you're a highbrow and married a highbrow broad. Somewhere in every intellectual is a dumb prick. You guys can't answer your own questions—

noise of the world is so terrible that we can endure it only by being coated with sleep. We can give the angels little help from within when they try to instill warmth into us—the warmth of love. And the angels also are fallible.