Quotes from Saul Bellow

That's the struggle of humanity, to recruit others to your version of what's real.

Yes, these business people have great energy. There's a question as to what's burned to produce it and what things we can and can't burn.

His mind took one of its odd jumps. He opened a clean page in his grimy notebook, and in the twig-divided shade of a wild cherry, infested with tent caterpillars, he began to make notes for a poem.

Your authority and my degeneracy are one in the same.

Maybe America didn't need art and inner miracles. It had so many outer ones. The USA was a big operation, very big. The more it, the less we.

The sense in which Goethe was right: Continued life means expectation, Death is the abolition of choice. The more choice is limited, the closer we are to death. The greatest cruelty is to curtail expectations without taking away life completely. A life term in prison is like that. So is citizenship in some countries. The best solution would be to live as if the ordinary expectations had not been removed, not from day to day, blindly. But that requires immense self-mastery.

To rip off a piece of lover's temper was a pleasure in her deepest vein of enjoyment.

I would never make a lion, I knew that; but I might pick up a small gain here and there in the attempt.

Instead I often felt unusually light and swift-paced, as if I were on a weightless bicycle and sprinting through the star world.

You never know what forms self-respect will take, especially with people whose rules of life are few.

Nobody should be a mystery intentionally. Unintentionally is mysterious enough.

El dictador necesita multitudes vivientes, pero también muchedumbres de cadáveres.

You don't know what you've got within you. A person either creates or he destroys. There is no neutrality …

Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I'd be happy to read them.

But privately when things got very bad I often looked into books to see whether I could find some helpful words, and one day I read, "The forgiveness of sins is perpetual and righteousness first is not required.

Some big insect flew in and began walking on the table. I don't know what insect it was, but it was brown, shining, and rich in structures. In the city the big universal chain of insects gets thin, but where there's a leaf or two it'll be represented.

But i am a prisoner of perception, a compulsory witness.

my feelings were big, sad, comfortless, of a thinking animal, my heart acting like an orb filled too big for my chest, not from revulsion, which I have to say I didn't feel, but over-all general misery.

No school without spectacular eccentrics and crazy hearts is worth attending.

The old continued to have one resurgence of foolishness after another, until the organism gave out altogether.

New York makes one think of the collapse of civilization, about Sodom and Gomorrah, the end of the world. The end wouldn't come as a surprise here. Many people already bank on it.

I have, perhaps, a slave-like constitution which is too easily restrained by bonds; it then becomes rebellious and bursts out in a comic revolution.

A professor from UBC observed that he agreed with Alexander Pope about the ultimate unreality of evil. Seen from the highest point of metaphysics. To a rational mind, nothing bad ever really happens. He was talking high-minded balls. Twaddle! I thought. I said, 'Oh? Do you mean that every gas chamber has a silver lining?

I am a prisoner of perception, a compulsory witness.