Saul Bellow Quotes

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

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.

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

Because he let the entire world press upon him. For instance? Well, for instance, what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organized power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the late failure of radical hopes. In a society that was no community and devalued the person.Owing to the multiplied power of numbers which made the self negligible. Which spent military billions against foreign enemies but would not pay for order at home. Which permitted savagery and barbarism in its own great cities. At the same time, the pressure of human millions who have discovered what concerted efforts and thoughts can do.

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

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.

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.

Your authority and my degeneracy are one in the same.

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

Go through what is comprehensible and you conclude that only the incomprehensible gives any light.

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

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

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

In the peculiar fate of people that makes them fat and rich, when this happens very swiftly there is the menace of the dreamy state that plunders their reality. Let's say that anyway old age and death would come, so why shouldn't the passage be comfortable? But this proposal doesn't make a firm mind, in the strange area where things swim too fast. Against this trouble thought may be a remedy; force of person is another one, and money and big-scale lavishness, unpierceable concreteness, organizational deeds. So there are these various remedies and many more, older ones, but you don't actually have full choice among all the varieties, especially those older ones of the invisible world. Most people make do with what they have, and labor in their given visible world, and this has its own stubborn merit.

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.