Saul Bellow Quotes

149 Sourced Quotes

It just came to me. The great pleasure of the book was that it came so easily. All I had to do was be there with buckets to catch it.

Saul Bellow
The spirit knows that its growth is the real aim of existence.

Saul Bellow
The more realistic you are the more you threaten the grounds of your own art.

Saul Bellow
You have, like the external world, your own phenomena inside.

Saul Bellow
The main reason for rewriting is not to achieve a smooth surface, but to discover the inner truth of your characters.

Saul Bellow
Great pressure is brought to bear to make us undervalue ourselves. On the other hand, civilization teaches that each of us is an inestimable prize. There are, then, these two preparations: one for life and the other for death. Therefore we value and are ashamed to value ourselves.

Saul Bellow
Retirement is an illusion. Not a reward but a mantrap. The bankrupt underside of success. A shortcut to death. Golf courses are too much like cemeteries.

Saul Bellow
I seem to have the blind self-acceptance of the eccentric who can't conceive that his eccentricities are not clearly understood.

Saul Bellow
The only real distinction at this dangerous moment in human history and cosmic development has nothing to do with medals and ribbons. Not to fall asleep is distinguished. Everything else is mere popcorn.

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

Saul Bellow
The modern reader (or viewer, or listener: let's include everybody) is perilously overloaded. His attention is, to use the latest lingo,'targeted' by powerful forces? Our consciousness is a staging area, a field of operations for all kinds of enterprises, which make free use of it.

Saul Bellow
And I'm convinced that knowing the names of things braces people up.

Saul Bellow
Losing a parent is something like driving through a plate-glass window. You didn't know it was there until it shattered, and then for years to come you're picking up the pieces -- down to the last glassy splinter.

Saul Bellow
The life of every citizen is becoming a business. This, it seems to me, is one of the worst interpretations of the meaning of human life history has ever seen. Man's life is not a business.

Saul Bellow
An utterly steady, reliable woman, responsible to the point of grimness. Daisy was a statistician for the Gallup Poll.

Saul Bellow
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.

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

Saul Bellow
To tell the truth I never had it so good. But I lacked the strength of character to bear such joy.

Saul Bellow
My face too blind, my mind too limited, my instincts too narrow. But this intensity, doesn't it mean anything?

Saul Bellow
The best and purest human beings, from the beginning of time, have understood that life is sacred.

Saul Bellow
An era of turmoil and ideological confusion, the principal phenomenon of the present age.

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

Saul Bellow
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.

Saul Bellow
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.

Saul Bellow
It's no disgrace to be a private, you know. Socrates was a plain foot soldier, a hoplite.

Saul Bellow
There is much to be said for exotic marriages. If your husband is a bore, it takes years longer to discover.

Saul Bellow
Certain blood will be given for half certain reasons, as in all wars.

Saul Bellow
One of the booby traps of freedom - which is bordered on all sides by isolation - is that we think so well of ourselves. I now see that I have helped myself to the best cuts at life's banquet.

Saul Bellow
(Socrates) said there were only two possibilities. Either the soul is immortal or, after death, things would be again as blank as they were before we were born.

Saul Bellow