Saul Bellow Quotes

...there is no old age of the soul.

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

Myself is thus and so, and will continue thus and so. And why fight it? My balance comes from instability.

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.

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

She was what we used to call a suicide blonde - dyed by her own hand.

Fun comes hard - like, alas, its prarens, pleasure and happiness, whom we have to pursue.

I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.

You have to fight for your life. That's the chief condition on which you hold it.

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

...chaos doesn't run the whole show.

Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death.

Art -- the fresh feeling, new harmony, the transforming magic which by means of myth brings back the scattered distracted soul from its modern chaos -- art, not politics, is the remedy.

From Euclid to Newton there were straight lines. The modern age analyzes the wavers.

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

I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.

The sand swallows burst out of their scupper holes in the bluffs and out over the transparent drown of the water, back again to the white, to the brown, to the black, from moving to stock-still sand waves and water-worked woods and roots that hugged and twisted in the sun.

I am moneys medium. It passes through me- taxes, insurance, mortgage, child support, rent, legal fees. All this dignified blundering costs plenty.

There are times when the most practical thing is to lie down.

A man should be able to hear, and to bear, the worst that could be said of him.

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.

Take our politicians: they're a bunch of yo-yos. The presidency is now a cross between a popularity contest and a high school debate, with an encyclopedia of cliches.

I love solitude, but I prize it most when plenty of company is available.

De Tocqueville considered the impulse toward well-being as one of the strongest impulses of a democratic society. He can't be blamed for underestimating the destructive powers generated by this same impulse.

An exchange occurs between man and woman. Love and thought complete each other in the human pair, and something like an exchange of souls takes place, according to the divine plan.

I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos.

It would not be practical for her to hate herself. Luckily, God sends a substitute, a husband.

Nobody asks you to love the whole world, only to be honest, ehrlich. Don't have a loud mouth. The more you love people the more they'll mix you up. A child loves, a person respects. Respect is better than love.

It is a joy to be choked with thought.

There is an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for.

And what about all the good I have in my heart - does it mean anything?

I immersed myself in The Periodic Table gladly and gratefully. There is nothing superfluous here, everything this book contains is essential. It is wonderful pure, and beautifully translated...I was deeply impressed.

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.

One must bear in mind the odd angle or slant that the rays of love have to take in order to reach a heart like mine.

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

Well, everybody has a history.

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

I mean you have been disappointed in love, but don't you know how many things there are to be disappointed in besides love? You are lucky to be still disappointed in love. Later it may be even more terrible.

In expressing love we belong among the undeveloped countries.

Fidelity is for phonographs

Live or die but don't poison everything.

A fool can throw a stone in a pond that 100 wise men can not get out.

Excuse me ... but I reject your definitions of me.

I am an American – Chicago born.

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

I see that I've become a really bad correspondent. It's not that I don't think of you. You come into my thoughts often. But when you do it appears to me that I owe you a particularly grand letter. And so you end in the "warehouse of good intentions": "Can't do it now." "Then put it on hold." This is one's strategy for coping with old age, and with death--because one can't die with so many obligations in storage. Our clever species, so fertile and resourceful in denying its weaknesses.

One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.

Also, he was smoking a cigar, and when a man is smoking a cigar, wearing a hat, he has an advantage; it is harder to find out how he feels.