Quotes from Saul Bellow

Cynicism was bread and meat to everyone. And irony, too. Maybe it couldn't be helped. It was probably even necessary.

It seemed necessary for him to lift one shoulder in order to put his hand into his jacket pocket.

He had on a double-breasted suit of the type then known as the pillbox; it was chalk-striped, pink on blue; the trousers hugged his ankles.

It's no small matter to become rich and famous by saying exactly what you think—to say it in your own words, without compromise.

She was a bathing beauty—short, the usual breasts, hips, and smooth thighs.

He was the obscure failure of an aggressive and powerful clan.

I'm going to shake this off. I'm not going to be a victim. I hate the victim bit

You're very sympathetic, even the young girls feel that. You'd make a good provider. But they go more for the other types.

she, although in a self-solicitous way, was a beautiful piece of tall work, on colossal but careful legs, hips forward; her mouth was big and would have been perfect if there hadn't been something self-tasting in it, eyes with complicated lids but magnificent in their slow heaviness, an erotic development. So that she had to cast

One reason why violence is so popular may be that psychiatric insights have worn us out and we get satisfaction from seeing them blown away with automatic weapons

But when the things that happen pour over everyone alike, then we can really see who is better and who's worse.

Even in a few minutes' conversation, do you realize how many times what you feel is converted before it comes out as what you say?

Dr. Adler surrendered his arm to the masseur, who was using wintergreen oil.

But the Jews feel that the world was created for each and every one of us, and when you destroy a human life you destroy an entire world—the world as it existed for that person.

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 having to make explanations or offer justifications of the Being people. While the Being people provoke these explanations.

Everybody wanted to be what he was to the limit.

mangoes in our breasts, which give us away. And it isn't only that I'm scared of all those wives, but there'll be nobody to talk to any more. I've gotten to that age where I need human voices and intelligence. That's all that's left. Kindness and love.

The elderly ladies were rouged and mascaraed and hennaed and used blue hair rinse and eye shadow and wore costume jewelry, and many of them were proud and stared at you with expressions that did not belong to their age.

This is the way of the weak; quiet and fair.

He was here to give aid, to clarify and move, and to make certain if he could that the greatness of humankind would not entirely evaporate in bourgeois well-being, et cetera. There was nothing of the average in Ravelstein's life. He did not accept dullness and boredom. Nor was depression tolerated.

It was the middle-class female solidarity, defending a nice girl from charges of calculation and viciousness. Nice girls marry for love. But should they fall out of love, they must be free to love another. No decent husband will oppose the heart.

Of course, I have known for a long time that we have inherited a mad fear of being slighted or scorned, an exacerbated honor. It is not quite the duelist's madness of a hundred years ago, but we are a people of tantrums nevertheless. A word exchanged in a movie or some other crowd, and we are ready to fly at one another.

But then why shouldn't he write the dead? He lived with them as much as with the living - perhaps more; and besides, his letters to the living were increasingly mental, and anyway, to the Unconscious, what was death? Dreams did not recognize it.

Because of unhappiness, at a certain age, the brain starts to die back.