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

Live or die, but don't poison everything.

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

External life being so mighty, the instruments so huge and terrible, the performances so great, the thoughts so great and threatening, you produce a someone who can exist before it. You invent a man who can stand before the terrible appearances. This way he can't get justice and he can't give justice, but he can live. And this is what mere humanity always does. It's made up of these inventors or artists, millions and millions of them, each in his own way trying to recruit other people to play a supporting role and sustain him in his make-believe... That's the struggle of humanity, to recruit others to your version of what's real.

Maybe America didn't need art and inner miracles. It had so many outer ones. The USA was a big operation, very big. The more it, the less we.