Quotes from Saul Bellow

From these villages come the Arab construction workers you see in Jerusalem. There are leftists, and even some old Zionists, who complain of this. They say that Jewish labor built Israel but that now the Arabs do all the disagreeable jobs and form an exploited class of bottom dogs. But this is probably not how the Arab laborers see themselves. Their wages have risen, and there is no precedent for the prosperity they enjoy.

Ah, é uma praga, a vida que se exibe, uma verdadeira praga! Estamos numa época em que todos os ridículos filhos de Adão desejam evidenciar-se perante os outros, com todos os seus ditos espirituosos, esgares e tiques, toda a glória da fealdade auto-adorada, afirmando aos restantes - num transbordar de narcisismo que os outros interpretam como benevolência - 'Aqui estou para dar testemunho. Vim para lhes servir de exemplo'. Pobres espectros tontos!.

Now settlers go into "liberated territories" like colonialists, with army support, and take land from the "natives.

What was wanted was an élite to underpin the rulers, themselves in turn supported and buttressed by a population which presumably understood, approved, and legitimated the aims of such an élite. Whoever knows the Middle East will agree that such a quest was the political equivalent of the search for the philosophical stone.

Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living. But the over-examined life makes you wish you were dead. Given the alternative, I'd rather be living.

I am a true adorer of life, and if I can't reach as high as the face of it, I plant my kiss somewhere lower down. Those who understand will require no further explanation.

... unless you made your life a turning point, there was no reason for existing.

Ninety per cent of life is a nightmare, do you think I am going to get it rounded up to hundred per cent?

The flesh would shrink and go, the blood would dry, but no one believes in his mind of minds or heart of hearts that the pictures do stop.

California is like an artificial limb the rest of the country doesn't really need. You can quote me on that.

Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.

I don't actually take much stock in the collapsing culture bit. I'm beginning to see it instead as the conduct of life without input from your soul.

I pretended not to understand. One of life's hardest jobs, to make a quick understanding slow. I think I succeeded, thought Herzog.

Art attempts to find in the universe, in matter as well as in the facts of life, what is fundamental, enduring, essential.

There's a kind of emptiness at the center of life ... nothing to form your life on, or by.

The dream of man's heart ... is that life may complete in significant pattern.

We are always looking for the book it is necessary to read next.

No realistic, sane person goes around Chicago without protection.

For the first time in history, the human species as a whole has gone into politics. Everyone is in the act, and there is no telling what may come of it.

Any artist should be grateful for a naive grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

In Los Angeles all the loose objects in the country were collected, as if America had been tilted and everything that wasn't tightly screwed down had slid into Southern California.

Goodness is achieved not in a vacuum, but in the company of other men, attended by love.

Whoever wants to reach a distant goal must take small steps.

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