Quotes from Saul Bellow

Certain expressions burn people up, and especially the expression of wisdom, which can lead you straight to the loony bin. You will have earned it!

Oh, death from what we do not want is the most common of all the causes.

Reality instructors. They want to teach you – to punish you with – the lessons of the Real.

But I have had visions of judgment. I see mainly the obstinacy of cripples. We do not love ourselves, but persist in stubbornness. Each man is stubbornly, stubbornly himself.

As for Sono, she was trying to instruct him, to show how a man should treat a woman. The pride of the peacock, the lust of the goat, and the wrath of the lion are the glory and wisdom of God.

Affable! His own son, his one and only son, could not speak his mind or ease his heart to him.

With a little luck, you discover that the people in your life, permanently placed, are able to follow your innermost, deeply concealed motives.

But I have had visions of judgment. I see mainly the obstinacy of cripples. We do not love ourselves, but persist in stubbornness. Each man is stubbornly, stubbornly himself. Above all himself, to the end of time.

antinomian.

You are lazy, disgraceful, tougher than you think but not yet a dead loss. In part you are humanly okay. We are supposed to do something for our kind. Don't get frenzied about money. Overcome your greed. Better luck with women. Last of all - remember: we are not natural beings but supernatural beings.

But how we love looking fine in the eyes of the world—how beautiful are the old when they are doing a snow job!

Tako sve ide kao i prije: jedni mnogo misle a ništa ne u?ine, a drugi o?ito ne misle ništa dok sve to rade.

This rest and well-being were only a momentary difference in the strange lining or variable silk between life and void.

Slavery has never really been abolished. More people are enslaved to different things than you can shake a stick at.

You burn the house to roast the pig.

the old lady to the movies or reading. Once in a while he slipped away to a lecture. He was studying law too. Grammick wasn't going to be sucked away from all private existence. I went along with this rush

And I saw Clara Spohr coming from the Oyster Bar or being washed forth into this sea, dismasted, clinging to her soul in the shipwreck of her beauty.

Suppose, then, that after the greatest , most passionate vividness and tender glory, oblivion is all were have to expect, the big blank of death. What options present themselves? One option is to train yourself gradually into oblivion so that no great change has taken place when you have died. Another option is to increase the bitterness of life so that death is a desirable release. (In this the rest of mankind will fully collaborate.)

I imagine, sometimes, that if a film could be made of one's life, every other frame would be death. It goes so fast we're not aware of it. Destruction and resurrection in alternate beats of being, but speed makes it seem continuous. But you see, kid, with ordinary consciousness you can't even begin to know what's happening.

Why should one man have the power to damage all nature or pollute the entire world?

As a man sees, so he is." The world as it appears to you classifies your mind.

Nature is a deep imitator. And as man is the prince of organisms he is master of adaptations. He is the artist of suggestions. He himself is his principle work of art, in the body working in the flesh. What miracle! What triumph! Also, what a disaster! What tears are to be shed!

Wait a minute, though: Sammler denied himself the privilege of the high-principled intellectual who must always be applying the purest standards and thumping the rest of his species on the head. When he tried to imagine a just social order, he could not do it. A non-corrupt society? He could not do that either. There were no revolutions that he could remember which had not been made for justice, freedom, and pure goodness. Their last state was always more nihilistic than the first.

He turned out to be right. Grielescu had attached himself to the Nazis, not to the milder, Italian form of fascism.