Top 100 Saul Bellow's Quotes
#1. 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
#2. The lesson of an American life like my father's ... is that achievements are compatible with decency (112).
Saul Bellow
#3. She's very pretty but she's honey from the icebox, if you know what I mean. Cold sweets won't spread.
Saul Bellow
#4. I want to tell you, don't marry suffering. Some people do. They get married to it, and sleep and eat together, just as husband and wife. If they go with joy they think it's adultery.
Saul Bellow
#5. I wish my dead days would quit bothering me and leave me alone. The bad stuff keeps coming back, and it's the worst rhythm there is. The repetition of a man's bad self, that's the worst suffering that's ever been known.
Saul Bellow
#6. It's no disgrace to be a private, you know. Socrates was a plain foot soldier, a hoplite.
Saul Bellow
#7. Look here, because they were born you think they have to turn out to be men? That's just an old-fashioned idea. And who tells them that? A big organization. One more big organization. A big organization makes dough or it doesn't last. If it makes dough it's for dough.
Saul Bellow
#8. 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.
Saul Bellow
#9. For God's sake,' the dog is saying, 'open the universe a little more!
Saul Bellow
#10. Still women- women. They do themselves more credit, there's more reality in women. They live closer to their nature. They have to. It's more with them. They have the breasts. They see their blood, and it does them good, while men are led to be vainer.
Saul Bellow
#11. Even worse is the discovery that one has been living out certain greeting-card sentiments, with ribbons of middle-class virtue tied in a bow around one's heart.
Saul Bellow
#12. Death discredits. Survival is the whole success. The voice of the dead goes away. There isn't any memory. The power that's established fills the earth and destiny is whatever survives, so whatever is is right.
Saul Bellow
#13. There's the most extraordinary, unheard of poetry buried in America, but none of the conventional means known to culture can even begin to extract it...the agony is too deep, the disorder too big for art enterprises undertaken in the old way.
Saul Bellow
#14. When a man's breast feels like a cage from which all the dark birds have flown - he is free, he is light. And he longs to have his vultures back again. He wants his customary struggles, his nameless, empty works, his anger, his afflictions and his sins.
Saul Bellow
#15. There's the big advantage of backwardness. By the time the latest ideas reach Chicago, they're worn thin and easy to see through. You don't have to bother with them and it saves lots of trouble.
Saul Bellow
#16. Unfortunately for the betterment of mankind it is not always the fair-minded who are in the right.
Saul Bellow
#17. Ninety per cent of life is a nightmare, do you think I am going to get it rounded up to hundred per cent?
Saul Bellow
#18. Saul Bellow: Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are able to see anything.
Christopher Hitchens
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. That's so often what it is with machinery: be somewhat in doubt and it carries the decision.
Saul Bellow
#23. 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
#24. From Euclid to Newton there were straight lines. The modern age analyzes the wavers.
Saul Bellow
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. You're used to difficult women. To struggle. Perhaps you like it when they give you a bad time." "Every treasure is guarded by dragons. That's how you can tell it's valuable. ... Do you mind if I unbutton my collar? It seems to be pressing on an artery.
Saul Bellow
#28. All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.
Saul Bellow
#29. The dream of man's heart ... is that life may complete in significant pattern.
Saul Bellow
#30. If I'm out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.
Saul Bellow
#31. What art thou?' Nothing. That's the answer. Nothing. In the heart of hearts- Nothing! So of course you can't stand that and want to be Something, and you try. But instead of being this Something, the man puts it over on everybody instead.
Saul Bellow
#32. I am a more disinterested Ginsberg admirer than Eddie is. Eddie, so to speak, comes to the table with a croupier's rake. He works for the house. He skims from poetry.
Saul Bellow
#33. And where was that day? Past and dead. Whose humiliating memories were these? His and not his father's. What had he to think back on that he could call good? Very, very little. You had to forgive. First, to forgive yourself, and then, general forgiveness.
Saul Bellow
#35. It's usually the selfish people who are loved the most. They do what you deny yourself, and you love them for it. You give them your heart.
Saul Bellow
#36. 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
#37. I pretended not to understand. One of life's hardest jobs, to make a quick understanding slow. I think I succeeded, thought Herzog.
Saul Bellow
#38. The human being now simply can't close his elected garment about himself. Obligations to one's fellows perhaps prevent full buttoning by artists.
Saul Bellow
#39. There's a kind of emptiness at the center of life ... nothing to form your life on, or by.
Saul Bellow
#40. 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
#41. Bringing people into the here-and-now. The real universe. That's the present moment. The past is no good to us. The future is full of anxiety. Only the present is real
the here-and-now. Seize the day.
Saul Bellow
#43. The only truly intersting side of the matter was the intimate design of the injury, the fact that it was so penetrating, custom-made exactly to your measure. It's fascinating that hatred should be so personal as to be almost loving. The knife and the wound aching for each other.
Saul Bellow
#44. Every treasure is guarded by dragons. That's how you can tell it's valuable.
Saul Bellow
#45. It is wrong to turn a man (a subject) into a thing (an object). By means of spiritual dialogue, the I-It relationship becomes an I-Thou relationship. God comes and goes in man's soul. And men come and go in each other's souls. Sometimes they come and go in each other's beds, too.
Saul Bellow
#46. I am something of a crank about sleep, for if I get seven and a quarter hours instead of eight I feel afflicted and drag myself around, although there's nothing really wrong with me. It's just another idea. That's how it is with my ideas; they seem to get strong while I weaken.
Saul Bellow
#47. Whatever the man's age, history, condition, knowledge, culture, development, he had an erection. Good currency anywhere. Recognized by the Bank of England.
Saul Bellow
#48. It's wasted on dummies." (Life is). "They give it to dummies and fools.
Saul Bellow
#49. You have one of two choices. Either you can panic and start making frantic attempts to reform under the glare of these awful critical eyes, or you can just say, The hell with you! I know what I'm doing. If you don't yet, it's because you haven't given me an attentive reading.
Saul Bellow
#50. Psychoanalysis pretends to investigate the Unconscious. The Unconscious by definition is what you are not conscious of. But the Analysts already know what's in it - they should, because they put it all in beforehand.
Saul Bellow
#51. Do you have feelings? There are correct and incorrect ways of indicating them. Do you have an inner life? It is nobody's business but your own. Do you have emotions? Strangle them.
Saul Bellow
#52. The hour that burst the spirit's sleep...
Saul Bellow
#53. Anxiety destroys scale, and suffering makes us lose perspective.
Saul Bellow
#54. 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
#55. And what about all the good I have in my heart - does it mean anything?
Saul Bellow
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. It's not up to me ... to make the world consistent.
Saul Bellow
#59. Nobody should be a mystery intentionally. Unintentionally is mysterious enough.
Saul Bellow
#60. Live or die, but don't poison everything.
Saul Bellow
#61. To rip off a piece of lover's temper was a pleasure in her deepest vein of enjoyment.
Saul Bellow
#62. 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
#63. There is something funny about the human condition, and civilized intelligence makes fun of its own ideas.
Saul Bellow
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. You have to fight for your life. That's the chief condition on which you hold it.
Saul Bellow
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. Art is order, made out of the chaos of life.
Saul Bellow
#70. One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.
Saul Bellow
#71. The main reason for rewriting is not to achieve a smooth surface, but to discover the inner truth of your characters.
Saul Bellow
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. Not that life should end is so terrible in itself, but that it should end with so many disappointments in the essential.
Saul Bellow
#75. It is sometimes necessary to repeat what all know. All mapmakers should place the Mississippi in the same location and avoid originality.
Saul Bellow
#76. It's goodbye to reality when love sets in.
Saul Bellow
#77. It was all there. Only he was not through with love and hate elsewhere.
Saul Bellow
#78. I don't know exactly how it's done. I let it alone a good deal.
Saul Bellow
#79. 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
#80. How could I be anything but a dissenter? Who wants the opinion of a group?
Saul Bellow
#81. The two real problems in life are boredom and death.
Saul Bellow
#82. A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
Saul Bellow
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. Whenever I write a dramatic poem I can't understand why the characters should ever want to be anything but poets themselves.
Saul Bellow
#87. 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
#88. No realistic, sane person goes around Chicago without protection.
Saul Bellow
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. In the depths of a man's being there was something that responded with a quack to such perfume. Quack!
Saul Bellow
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. A human soul devoid of longing was a soul deformed, deprived of its highest good, sick unto death.
Saul Bellow
#96. I like Hemingway and I like a lot Jewish writers (such as) Saul Bellow.
Wesley Clark
#97. 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
#98. We take foreigners to be incomplete Americans
convinced that we must help and hasten their evolution.
Saul Bellow
#99. He yelled, Charlie, you know where I am, don't you? All right, Charlie, this isn't literature. This is life.
Saul Bellow
#100. Mimi didn't care about secrecy. She led a proclaimed life, and once she got talking she held back nothing.
Saul Bellow
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
