Quotes from Saul Bellow

The only truly intersting side of the matter was the intimate design of the injury, the fact that it was so penetrating, custom-made exactly to your measure. It's fascinating that hatred should be so personal as to be almost loving. The knife and the wound aching for each other.

What art thou?' Nothing. That's the answer. Nothing. In the heart of hearts- Nothing! So of course you can't stand that and want to be Something, and you try. But instead of being this Something, the man puts it over on everybody instead.

Well, don't build me up so, and you won't have to tear me down.

Life, said Samuel Butler, is like giving a concert on the violin while learning to play the instrument—that, friends, is real wisdom.

Many common lies and hypocrisies are like that, just out of the harmony of the moment.

Some powerful magnificence not human in other words, seemed under me. And it was the same mild pink colour, like the water of a watermelon, that did it. At once I recognised the importance of this, as throughout my life I had known these moments when the dumb begin to speak, when I hear the voices of objects and colours; then the physical universe starts to wrinkle and change and heave and rise and smooth, so it seems even the dogs have to lean against a tree, shivering.

Everybody pays the heart lip service, of course, but everybody is more familiar with the absence of love than with its presence and gets so used to the feeling of emptiness that it becomes normal. You don't miss the foundation of feeling until you begin to look for your self and can't find a support in the affects for a self.

Not that life should end is so terrible in itself, but that it should end with so many disappointments in the essential.

Ravelstein mentioned that Keynes had married a Russian ballerina. He also explained to me that Uranus had fathered Aphrodite but that she had had no mother. She was conceived by the sea foam. He would say such things not because he thought I was ignorant of them but because he judged that I needed at a given moment to have my thoughts directed toward them.

Do we always, always to the point of misery, do a thing?

You have to have the power to employ pain, to repent, to be illuminated, you must have the opportunity and even the time.

And the process started over again. Once more it was, Who are you? And I had to confess that I didn't know where to begin.

You can know a man by his devils and the way he gives hurts.

The same things are done by us, over and over, with terrible predictability. One may be forgiven, in view of this, for wishing at least to associate with beauty.

It wasn't that he was specially ungenerous but that he put things off to give his generosity a longer and more significant route.

You do all you can to humanize and familiarize the world, and suddenly it becomes more strange than ever.

When I didn't argue he was satisfied he had persuaded me, and was not the first to make that mistake.

If love is love, it's free.

You never have to change anything you get up in the middle of the night to write.

God may save all, but human rescue is only for a few.

Everyone was like the faces on a playing card, upside down either way.

It was clear that the man was no fool. But what was the use of not being a fool if you acted like this?

How we all love extreme cases and apocalypses, fires, drownings, stranglings, and the rest of it. The bigger our mild, basically ethical, safe middle classes grow the more radical excitement is in demand. Mild or moderate truthfulness or accuracy seems to have no pull at all.

Therefore we didn't talk of genuine things.