Quotes from Saul Bellow

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.

Shall I run back into the desert ... and stay there until the devil has passed out of me and I am fit to meet human kind again without driving it to despair at the first look? I haven't had enough desert yet.

Oh, God," Wilhelm prayed, "Let me out of my trouble. Let me out of my thoughts, and let me do something better with myself. For all the time I have wasted I am very sorry. Let me out of this clutch and into a different life. For I am all balled up. Have mercy.

In the end you can't save your soul and life by thought. But if you think , the least of the consolation prizes is the world.

A good American makes propaganda for whatever existence has forced him to become.

But she's a nut, and nuts win.

Do you have feelings? There are correct and incorrect ways of indicating them. Do you have an inner life? It is nobody's business but your own. Do you have emotions? Strangle them.

He didn't ask Where will you spend eternity? as religious the-end-is-near picketers did but rather, With what, in this modern democracy, will you meet the demands of your soul?

It was probably no accident that it was the cripple Hephaestus who made ingenious machines; a normal man didn't have to hoist or jack himself over hindrances by means of cranks, chains and metal parts. Then it was in the line of human advance that Einhorn could do so much.

between human beings there are only two alternatives, either brotherhood or crime.

One way or another the no doubt mad idea entered my mind that my own actions had historic importance and this fantasy (?) made it appear that people who harmed me were interfering with an important experiment.

So things go on as before with those who think a great deal and effect nothing, and those who think nothing evidently doing it all...

And I dreamed down at the clouds, and thought that when I was a kid I had dreamed up at them, and having dreamed at the clouds from both sides as no other generation of men has done, one should be able to accept his death very easily.

It is my childish mind that thinks people are ready to give it just because you need it.

The body, she says, is subject to the force of gravity. But the soul is ruled by levity, pure.

Society is what beats me. Alone I can be pretty good, but let me go among people and there's the devil to pay.

For Christ's sake don't cry, you idiot! Live or die, but don't poison everything.

A man may say, From now on I'm going to speak the truth. But the truth hears him and runs away and hides before he's even done speaking.

The terms which, in his inmost heart, each man knows. As I know mine. As all know. For that is the truth of it — that we all know, God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know.

Sometimes I wished I could become a shoemaker too.

It is wrong to turn a man (a subject) into a thing (an object). By means of spiritual dialogue, the I-It relationship becomes an I-Thou relationship. God comes and goes in man's soul. And men come and go in each other's souls. Sometimes they come and go in each other's beds, too.

And what about all the good I have in my heart—doesn't it mean anything?

Being right was largely a matter of explanations.

I wish my dead days would quit bothering me and leave me alone. The bad stuff keeps coming back, and it's the worst rhythm there is. The repetition of a man's bad self, that's the worst suffering that's ever been known.