Quotes from Saul Bellow

shrunken passages of his body. And then the body, too – ah, God! – wastes away; and leaves its bones, and even the bones at last wear away and crumble to dust in that shallow place of deposit. And thus humanized, this planet in its galaxy of stars and worlds goes from void to void, infinitesimal, aching with its unrelated significance.

Maybe he saw that my mystery was, at bottom, nothing but misery.

I wonder whether there will ever be enough tranquility under modern circumstances to allow our contemporary Wordsworth to recollect anything. I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness that characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.

Forgetfully, Wilhelm traveled for miles in second gear; he was seldom in the right lane and he neither gave signals nor watched for lights.

Why, it was a crying matter, no fooling, to anyone who might know which side was up, that here was I trying to refuse to lead a disappointed life.

His marriage, too, had been like that. Through such decisions somehow his life had taken form. And so, from the moment when he tasted the peculiar flavor of fatality in Dr. Tamkin, he could no longer keep back the money.

Americans find it hard to believe that foreigners are unalterably foreign, for they have seen generations of immigrants who became Americans. But old cultures are impermeable and exclusive—none more so than the French.

He was an extremely correct person except that he never shaved in the morning, not caring, probably, how he looked to the fumblers and the old people and the operators and the gamblers and the idlers of Broadway uptown.

Ja kriv? Kako to misliš? - Jer si ti intelektualac, a oženio si intelektualku. U svakom intelektualcu krije se negdje budala. Vi ljudi ne znate odgovoriti niti na vlastita pitanja...

A columnist on the Daily News said that to Ravelstein money was something you threw from the rear platform of speeding trains.

critical powers. You stifle your shrewdness. Before you know it you are paying a humongous divorce settlement to a woman who had more than once declared that she was an innocent who had no understanding of money matters.

And I hold with Spinoza (I hope he won't mind) that to demand what is impossible for any human being, to exercise power where it can't be exercised, is tyranny.

world. Something practical was done with thought. The mental became also the real. Relief from the pursuit of absolutes made life pleasant. Only a small class of fanatical intellectuals, professionals, still chased after these absolutes.

Ona je manje kurva od ve?ine drugih. Svi smo mi kurve na ovom svijetu, to upamti. Ja jako dobro znam da sam ja kurva. A ti si teški mamlaz, to mi postaje jasno. Bar mi tako govore intelektualci. Ali kladim se s tobom za bilo šta da si i ti kurva.

But oh, unreality! Unreality, unreality! That has been my scheme for a troubled but eternal life.

While Israel fought for life, debaters weighed her sins and especially the problem of the Palestinians. In this disorderly century refugees have fled from many countries. In India, in Africa, in Europe, millions of human beings have been put to flight, transported, enslaved, stampeded over the borders, left to starve, but only the case of the Palestinians is held permanently open.

Arabs are harvesting

Arab boys singing their lessons.

The very Orthodox Professor Harold Fisch, bearded and wearing a skullcap, tells me that "the liberated territories" must be colonized and reclaimed by the Jews. The West Bank is Promised Land. For that matter the East Bank is, too. Professor Fisch, English by birth and dean of something or other at the new university in Beersheba, has no patience with the objections I offer. He tells me fiercely in his Oxbridge voice that we American Jews are not Jews at all.

As we go up into the Via Dolorosa, we hear an exciting jingle. Arab boys are racing their donkeys down the hill. You

As we go up into the Via Dolorosa, we hear an exciting jingle. Arab boys are racing their donkeys down the hill. You look for sleighs and frost when you hear this jingle-belling. Instead, there are boys stern and joyous, galloping hell-bent on their donkeys toward the Lions' Gate.

The thing I learned from her was of the utmost importance; namely, that everyone sees to it his fate is shared. Or tries to see to it.

I always suspected of him that he had in some fashion discovered that there were ways in which to be human was unutterably dismal, and that all his life was given over to avoiding those ways.

I don't think the struggles of desire can ever be won. Ages of longing and willing, willing and longing, and how have they ended? In a draw, dust and dust.