Saul Bellow - The Adventures of Augie March (1953)

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As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting — the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Saul Bellow
Is love supposed to ruin you? It seems to me you shouldn't destroy yourself out of life for purposes of love—or what good is it?

Saul Bellow
It wasn't that he was specially ungenerous but that he put things off to give his generosity a longer and more significant route.

Saul Bellow
Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.

Saul Bellow
Boredom…is also the shriek of unused capacities, the doom of serving no great end or design, or contributing to no master force.

Saul Bellow
I am an American, Chicago born — Chicago, that somber city — and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.

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
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