Quotes from Saul Bellow

My soul is like a pawn shop. I mean it's filled with unredeemed pleasures, old clarinets, and cameras, and motheaten fur.

There's the most extraordinary, unheard of poetry buried in America, but none of the conventional means known to culture can even begin to extract it...the agony is too deep, the disorder too big for art enterprises undertaken in the old way.

Going up, Herzong found a bouquet of violets, dropped from the hand of a woman. Perhaps a bride. Little perfume remained in them, but they made him remember... These violets smelled to him like female tears. He gave them a burial in the trash ca, hoping they had not dropped from a disappointed hand.

O Lord! he concluded, forgive all these trespasses. Lead me not into Penn Station.

To him, perpetual thought of death was a sin. Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.

Just because your soul is being torn to pieces doesn't mean that you stop analyzing the phenomena.

The ocean was waiting with grand and bitter provocations, as if it invited you to think how deep it was, how much colder than your blood or saltier, or to outguess it, to tell which were its feints or passes and which its real intentions, meaning business.

I have begun in old age to understand just how oddly we all are put together. We are so proud of our autonomy that we seldom if ever realize how generous we are to ourselves, and just how stingy with others. One of the booby traps of freedom--which is bordered on all sides by isolation--is that we think so well of ourselves. I now see that I have helped myself to the best cuts at life's banquet.

Sometimes I wonder," I said, "if people who are going to tell the truth shouldn't make sure first that they can defend themselves.

He yelled, Charlie, you know where I am, don't you? All right, Charlie, this isn't literature. This is life.

Charlie, you know where I am, don't you? All right, Charlie, this isn't literature. This is life.

Whatever the man's age, history, condition, knowledge, culture, development, he had an erection. Good currency anywhere. Recognized by the Bank of England.

Emancipation resulting in madness. Unlimited freedom to choose and play a tremendous variety of roles with a lot of coarse energy.

I am sure you were sincere. Not insincere. True insincerity is hard to find.

Here in the city she had gilded her nails. They shone. And she had put on a velvet dress, this soft red one, which was heavy. The buttons were in the form of seashells.

He wondered at times whether he didn't belong to a class of people secretly convinced they had an arrangement with fate; in return for docility or ingenuous good will they were to be shielded from the worst brutalities in life.

The sun of that chilishness goes on shining even when the larger bodies of hotter stars have risen to smelt you and cover you with their influence. The recenter stars may be more critical, more in the eye, but that earlier sun still remains a long time.

I don't know how it all at once came to me to talk a lot, tell jokes, kick up, and suddenly have views. When it was time to have them, there was no telling how I picked them from the air.

it greatly bothered him that I had such a flunky job, washing cages and sweeping up dogs' hair; and also that I was no longer a college man but trying to keep up on Helmholtz who was a dead number to him; in other words, that I should be of the unformed darkened-out mass. It was often that way with me, that people would feel the world owed me distinctness.

I want! I want! I want!

Again! It was like the question asked by Tennyson about the flower in the crannied wall. That is, to answer it might involve the history of the universe.

A person can become tired of looking himself over and trying to fix himself up. You can spend the entire second half of your life recovering from the mistakes of the first half

Well, what o you want? I said. I am the type of guy who couldn't survive without disfigurement. Life has worked me over. It wasn't just the war, either.... I got a bad wound, you know. But the shots of life... I gave myself a bang on the breast. Right here! You know what I mean, King?

Well, I need a job. Something that'll leave me the free time I want. I like the way you arrange your life. What do you intend to do with this free time? I intend to use it. I didn't like the implication of this. Why should he need his time free and I be questioned?