Saul Bellow Quotes

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

The challenge of modern freedom, or the combination of isolation and freedom which confronts you, is to make yourself up. The danger is that you may emerge from the process as a not-entirely-human creature.
(Referenced in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People by Toby Young)

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.

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.

In Los Angeles all the loose objects in the country were collected, as if America had been tilted and everything that wasn't tightly screwed down had slid into Southern California.

"Only self-hatred could lead him to ruin himself because his heart was "broken.

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

She's very pretty but she's honey from the icebox, if you know what I mean. Cold sweets won't spread.

Much of junk culture has a core of crisis — shoot-outs, conflagrations, bodies weltering in blood, naked embracers or rapist-stranglers. The sounds of junk culture are heard over a ground bass of extremism. Our entertainments swarm with specters of world crisis. Nothing moderate can have any claim to our attention.

Guys like you make life easy for some women.

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.

A human soul devoid of longing was a soul deformed, deprived of its highest good, sick unto death.

Well, there is a piece of famous advice, grand advice even if it is German, to forget what you can't bear. The strong can forget, can shut out history.
Very good. Even if it is self-flattery to speak of strength — these aesthetic philosophers, they take a posture, but power sweeps postures away. Still, it's true you can't go on transposing one nightmare into another, Nietzsche was certainly right about that. The tender-minded must harden themselves. Is this world nothing but a barren lump of coke? No, no, but what sometimes seems a system of prevention, a denial of what every human being knows.
I love my children, but I am the world to them, and bring them nightmares.
I had this child by my enemy. And I love her. The sight of her, the odor of her hair, this minute, makes me tremble with love. Isn't it mysterious how I love the child of my enemy?
But a man doesn't need happiness for himself.
No, he can put up with any amount of torment — with recollections, with his own familiar evils, despair.
And this is the unwritten history of man, his unseen, negative accomplishment, his power to do without gratification for himself provided there is something great, something into which his being, and all beings can go. He does not need meaning as long as such intensity has scope. Because then it is self-evident; it is meaning.

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

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