When we read the best nineteenth- and twentieth-century novelists, we soon realize that they are trying in a variety of ways to establish a definitio… - Saul Bellow

You don't know the meaning of true love if you think it can be deliberately selected. You just love, that's all. A natural force, irresistible.

How we all love extreme cases and apocalypses, fires, drownings, stranglings, and the rest of it. The bigger our mild, basically ethical, safe middle classes grow the more radical excitement is in demand. Mild or moderate truthfulness or accuracy seems to have no pull at all.

In an age of enormities, the emotions are naturally weakened. We are continually called upon to have feelings — about genocide, for instance, or about famine or the blowing up of passenger planes — and we are all aware that we are incapable of reacting appropriately. A guilty consciousness of emotional inadequacy or impotence makes people doubt their own human weight.