Bellow Quotes

#1. We didn't need light & shade, irony or humor. An iconic Daltrey bellow could convey an extrodinary range of human emotion; withering sadness, self pity, loneliness, abandonment, spiritual desperation, the loss of childhood, as well as the more obvious rage & frustration, joy & triumph.

Pete Townshend

#2. So very many times over the next three years i heard her laughter - no silver bells or sweet rippling sounds was her laughter, but like a five-year-old's bellow of delight, a cross between a puppy's yelp, a motor-bike and a bicycle pump.

Fynn

#3. There are so many ways of saying Hi. Hiss it, trill it, bark it, sing it, bellow it, laugh it, cough it. A simple stroll in the hallway calls for paragraphs, sentences in your head, decisions galore.

Frank McCourt

#4. I like Hemingway and I like a lot Jewish writers (such as) Saul Bellow.

Wesley Clark

#5. Become nothing...
hurry .... dissolve ...
end the fire ...
Drown in the ocean of love...
Disintegrate...
Become like water
No even lighter
Ethereal Vapour
Bellow across the hearts
Embalm spirits
Create Bliss.

Gabriel Iqbal

#6. Fortune favors the brave."
Another moment of silence. And then, Iolanthe found herself shouting at the top of her lungs, her voice nearly drowned by the bellow of all the rebels present, "And the brave make their own fortune!

Sherry Thomas

#7. I enjoy a misogynist so long as they have a wicked sense of humor and know, on some level, that they're pigs. This is why I enjoy Philip Roth but not Saul Bellow or James Salter.

Heidi Julavits

#8. Saul Bellow: Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are able to see anything.

Christopher Hitchens

#9. You might learn as much about how to write by reading Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Wallace Stevens, Raymond Chandler, Saul Bellow, Paul Muldoon or a hundred other good novelists or poets than by seeing another round of John Ford revivals.

David Denby

#10. Stand there, damn'd meddling villain, and be silent;
For if thou utt'rest but a single word,
A cough or hem, to cross me in my speech,
I'll send thy cursed spirit from the earth,
To bellow with the damn'd!

Joanna Baillie

#11. I simply get up in the morning and go to work, and I read at night. Like Abe Lincoln. - Saul Bellow

Mason Currey

#12. Why?" he screamed, letting the noise bellow out loud and ferocious. "Why can I not have some measure of peace?" he questioned.

Charlotte Featherstone

#13. I was just slipping my pajama top over my head when I heard Ren bellow, YOU ate ALL of my peanut ... butter ... COOKIES?

Colleen Houck

#14. Throughout my career I've struggled to encourage people to read my books on a more metaphorical level. I'm less attached to my settings than, for example, Saul Bellow. The setting of a novel for me is just a part of the technique. I choose it at the end.

Kazuo Ishiguro

#15. Don't give me that Christian forgiveness bullshit, Dukach. I'm a vindictive Jew!" he'd bellow.

Jonathan Galassi

#16. I am the master of this house! Let me in! he wanted to bellow, but he doubted anyone was going to listen. This, he decided, was what came of marriage. Well,

Elizabeth Boyle

#17. Tillie Olsen. James Joyce. Robert Stone. I must have read Updike's Rabbit, Run five times and Bellow's Herzog

Pamela Paul

#18. Indeed, with the Radletts, you never could tell. Why, for instance, would Victoria bellow like a bull and half kill Jassy whenever Jassy said, in a certain tone of voice, pointing her finger with a certain look, "Fancy?" I think they hardly knew why, themselves.

Nancy Mitford

#19. Lyra has never seen such a sight, never heard such a bellow; it was like a mountain laughing.

Philip Pullman

#20. All they wanted of me was one belch of affirmation and I'd bellow it out loud. Yes! Yes! YES! That was all anyone wanted of us, that we should be heard and not seen, and then heard only in one big optimistic chorus of yassuh, yassuh, yassuh!

Ralph Ellison

#21. Once again it is demonstrated that people do not love their chains or their jailers,-and that the aspiration for a civilized life - that "universal eligibility to be noble," as Saul Bellow's Augie March so imperishably phrases it - is proper and common to all.

Christopher Hitchens

#22. Ah, that's better! Redrought boomed again. In fact, the King only ever seemed to bellow, boom or shout, no matter what his mood. But nobody seemed to mind too much; at least he never had to repeat himself.

Stuart Hill

#23. Saul Bellow never took my advice when he was my friend.

Leslie Fiedler

#24. He who does not bellow the truth when he knows the truth makes himself the accomplice of liars and forgers.

Charles Peguy

#25. John D. MacDonald is by any standards a better writer than Saul Bellow, only MacDonald writes thrillers and Bellow is a human-heart chap, so guess who wears the top-grade laurels?

Kingsley Amis

#26. I don't even like to talk about it. I hated being a number and not merely because I was a very small one. I let them bellow at me for just as long as it took me to find enough pluck to bellow back at them.

George Grosz

#27. The reason Saul Bellow doesn't talk to me anymore is because he knows his new novels are not worth reading.

Leslie Fiedler

#28. Body and soul can never be married
I need to become who I already am and will bellow forever at this incongruity which has committed me to hell

Sarah Kane

#29. She accused him of not thinking she was enough for him? The woman was entirely too much for him! She made him want to bellow with rage and hit things, then lock her in a room and kiss her senseless, until she gave in.

Sarah MacLean

#30. I heard Nik bellow, "Aimee. Get your ass back in here, now!" As the doors slid closed, I flipped him off. Just who did that man think he was? I would figure this out myself. I was sick and tired of these powerful, commanding men telling me what to do with my life. They could all go to hell. *****

Lora Ann

#31. Just pretend you know what you're doing. Plant a menacing scowl on your face and stand guard at the door. If someone advances your way, brandish the weapon and bellow like an Arcrean clansman.

Nicole Sager

#32. An extraordinary lightness seemed to spread through his whole body and the next second, in a rush of wings, they were flying upward through the pipe. Harry could hear Lockhart dangling bellow him, saying, Amazing! Amazing! This is just like magic!

J.K. Rowling

#33. Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?" Bellow quipped. Tolstoy was "white," and so Tolstoy "mattered," like everything else that was white "mattered.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#34. The aquilegia sprinkled on the rocks
A scarlet rain; the yellow violet
Sat in the chariot of its leaves, the phlox
Held spikes of purple flame in meadows wet,
And all the streams with vernal-scented reed
Were fringed, and streaky bellow of miskodeed.

Bayard Taylor

#35. ... The freshly devoured peppermint she loved lofted from her breath and up to his nose with her loud bellow of Father in his ear, and Caxton was sure that he could smell that scent now out in the crisp night air. "You demon!" he screamed with all his might. ...

Jettie Necole

#36. We didn't need light & shade, irony or humor. An iconic Daltrey bellow could convey an extrodinary range of human emotion; withering sadness, self pity, loneliness, abandonment, spiritual desperation, the loss of childhood, as well as the more obvious rage & frustration, joy & triumph.

Pete Townshend

#37. He wanted to roar like a lion on a cement floor. And bellow like a polar bear with yellow fur worn down to pink skin against the tiles of an enclosure in a zoo. The disgust must come. Let it drip down the walls. Scorch the ceiling black with hatred. Liberate rage.

Adam Nevill

#38. I had the idea in my twenties that a writer could immediately become the late Henry James. Henry James himself had to mature. Even Saul Bellow did.

Cynthia Ozick

#39. Some girls have a real sexy giggle, but whenever I laugh it always comes out somewhere between a bellow and a snort!

Elizabeth Jane Howard

#40. I was 17 when I decided to write stories as big as cathedrals, overflowing with the kind of memorable and audacious characters Walker Percy, Ernest Hemingway and Saul Bellow created.

Philip Schultz

#41. We can ast for comfort and hope and patience and courage ... and we'll git what we ast for. They ain't no gar'ntee thet we ain't go'n have no troubles and ain't go'n die. But shore as frogs croak and cows bellow, God'll forgive us if'n we ast Him to.

Olive Ann Burns

#42. Saul Bellow once said, 'A writer is a reader who has moved to emulation' - which I think is true. I just started writing and made that jump from reader to writer and learned how hard it was, but also how much fun it was - losing myself in these imaginary worlds.

Stewart O'Nan

#43. SF's NO GOOD!
They bellow 'til we're deaf
But =this= is good
Well, then, it's not SF!

Kingsley Amis

#44. Among contemporaries, I hugely admire Alice Munro, our Chekhov, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and John Updike, American masters all. I also believe that the voice of Gordon Lish is astoundingly original and sorrowful.

Cynthia Ozick

#45. It's goodbye to reality when love sets in.

Saul Bellow

#46. It is sometimes necessary to repeat what all know. All mapmakers should place the Mississippi in the same location and avoid originality.

Saul Bellow

#47. Not that life should end is so terrible in itself, but that it should end with so many disappointments in the essential.

Saul Bellow

#48. It was probably no accident that it was the cripple Hephaestus who made ingenious machines; a normal man didn't have to hoist or jack himself over hindrances by means of cranks, chains and metal parts. Then it was in the line of human advance that Einhorn could do so much.

Saul Bellow

#49. Well, I need a job. Something that'll leave me the free time I want."
"I like the way you arrange your life. What do you intend to do with this free time?"
"I intend to use it." I didn't like the implication of this. Why should he need his time free and I be questioned?

Saul Bellow

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

Saul Bellow

#51. One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.

Saul Bellow

#52. Art is order, made out of the chaos of life.

Saul Bellow

#53. No, the truth must be something we understand at once, without an introduction or explanation, but so common and familiar that we don't always realize it's around us.

Saul Bellow

#54. Society is what beats me. Alone I can be pretty good, but let me go among people and there's the devil to pay.

Saul Bellow

#55. You have to fight for your life. That's the chief condition on which you hold it.

Saul Bellow

#56. The hour that burst the spirit's sleep...

Saul Bellow

#57. Death is going to take the boundaries away from us, that we should no more be persons. That's what death is about. When that is what life also wants to be about, how can you feel except rebellious?

Saul Bellow

#58. There is something funny about the human condition, and civilized intelligence makes fun of its own ideas.

Saul Bellow

#59. All human accomplishment has this same origin, identically. Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination! It converts to actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems!

Saul Bellow

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

Saul Bellow

#61. Live or die, but don't poison everything.

Saul Bellow

#62. Nobody should be a mystery intentionally. Unintentionally is mysterious enough.

Saul Bellow

#63. It's not up to me ... to make the world consistent.

Saul Bellow

#64. 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

#65. Keep out of this, please, will you, Mildred? A child isn't a toy." "Oh," she said, "they grow up. Time does it more than fathers and mothers. The parents take too much credit.

Saul Bellow

#66. And what about all the good I have in my heart - does it mean anything?

Saul Bellow

#67. People forget how sensational the things are that they do. They don't see it on themselves. It blends into the background of their daily life.

Saul Bellow

#68. Anxiety destroys scale, and suffering makes us lose perspective.

Saul Bellow

#69. But enough of that
here I am. Hineni! How marvelously beautiful it is today. He stopped in the overgrown yard, shut his eyes in the sun, against flashes of crimson, and drew in the odors of catalpa-bells, soil, honeysuckle, wild onions, and herbs.

Saul Bellow

#70. Mimi didn't care about secrecy. She led a proclaimed life, and once she got talking she held back nothing.

Saul Bellow

#71. He yelled, Charlie, you know where I am, don't you? All right, Charlie, this isn't literature. This is life.

Saul Bellow

#72. We take foreigners to be incomplete Americans
convinced that we must help and hasten their evolution.

Saul Bellow

#73. But maybe time was invented so that misery might have an end. So that it shouldn't last forever? There may be something in this. And bliss, just the opposite, is eternal? There is no time in bliss. All the clocks were thrown out of heaven.

Saul Bellow

#74. A human soul devoid of longing was a soul deformed, deprived of its highest good, sick unto death.

Saul Bellow

#75. It's no small matter to become rich and famous by saying exactly what you think - to say it in your own words, without compromise.

Saul Bellow

#76. But Mimi- her tenderness didn't have an easy visibility. You wondered what it would be, and after what terrible manifestations it would appear.

Saul Bellow

#77. He had come into a view of mutability, and I too could see that one is only ostensibly born to remain in specified limits.

Saul Bellow

#78. In the depths of a man's being there was something that responded with a quack to such perfume. Quack!

Saul Bellow

#79. Yes, these business people have great energy. There's a question as to what's burned to produce it and what things we can and can't burn.

Saul Bellow

#80. It was all there. Only he was not through with love and hate elsewhere.

Saul Bellow

#81. No realistic, sane person goes around Chicago without protection.

Saul Bellow

#82. Shall I run back into the desert ... and stay there until the devil has passed out of me and I am fit to meet human kind again without driving it to despair at the first look? I haven't had enough desert yet.

Saul Bellow

#83. Whenever I write a dramatic poem I can't understand why the characters should ever want to be anything but poets themselves.

Saul Bellow

#84. Again! It was like the question asked by Tennyson about the flower in the crannied wall. That is, to answer it might involve the history of the universe.

Saul Bellow

#85. Americans must be the most sententious people in history. Far too busy to be religious, they have always felt that they sorely needed guidance.

Saul Bellow

#86. Some big insect flew in and began walking on the table. I don't know what insect it was, but it was brown, shining, and rich in structures. In the city the big universal chain of insects gets thin, but where there's a leaf or two it'll be represented.

Saul Bellow

#87. A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

Saul Bellow

#88. The two real problems in life are boredom and death.

Saul Bellow

#89. How could I be anything but a dissenter? Who wants the opinion of a group?

Saul Bellow

#90. I may well be a flop at this line of endeavor. Columbus too thought he was a flop, probably, when they sent him back in chains. Which didn't prove there was no America.

Saul Bellow

#91. I don't know exactly how it's done. I let it alone a good deal.

Saul Bellow

#92. 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.

Saul Bellow

#93. I don't actually take much stock in the collapsing culture bit. I'm beginning to see it instead as the conduct of life without input from your soul.

Saul Bellow

#94. A man may say, "From now on I'm going to speak the truth." But the truth hears him and runs away and hides before he's even done speaking.

Saul Bellow

#95. From Euclid to Newton there were straight lines. The modern age analyzes the wavers.

Saul Bellow

#96. For the first time in history, the human species as a whole has gone into politics. Everyone is in the act, and there is no telling what may come of it.

Saul Bellow

#97. That's so often what it is with machinery: be somewhat in doubt and it carries the decision.

Saul Bellow

#98. I mean you have been disappointed in love, but don't you know how many things there are to be disappointed in besides love? You are lucky to be still disappointed in love. Later it may be even more terrible.

Saul Bellow

#99. I would never make a lion, I knew that; but I might pick up a small gain here and there in the attempt.

Saul Bellow

#100. 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