01UndatedHe knew what retributions your devils are liable to bring for the way you treat your wife and women or behave while your father is on his deathbed, what you ought to think of your pleasure, of acting like a cockroach; he had the intelligence for the comparison. He had the intelligence to be sublime. But sublimity can't exist only as a special gift of the few, due to an accident of origin, like being born an albino. If it were, what interest would we have in it?Saul Bellow / quote ↗
02UndatedEverybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.Saul Bellow / quote ↗
03UndatedEven if I am not the honestest type in the world I don't want to lie more than is average.Saul Bellow / quote ↗
04UndatedStrict and literal truthfulness was a trivial game and might even be a disagreeable neurotic affliction.Saul Bellow / quote ↗
05UndatedWhat did Danton lose his head for, or why was there a Napoleon, if it wasn't to make a nobility of us all?Saul Bellow / quote ↗
06UndatedIf you could have confidence in nature you would not have to fear. It would keep you up. Creative is nature. Rapid. Lavish. Inspirational. It shapes leaves. It rolls the waters of the earth. Man is the chief of this. All creations are his just inheritance. You don't know what you've got within you. A person either creates or he destroys. There is no neutrality.Saul Bellow / quote ↗
07UndatedEvery treasure is guarded by dragons. That's how you can tell it's valuable.Saul Bellow / quote ↗
08UndatedIn the history of the world many souls have been, are, and will be, and with a little reflection this is marvelous and not depressing. Many jerks are made gloomy about it, for they think quantity buries them alive. That's just crazy. Numbers are very dangerous, but the main thing about them is that they humble your pride. And that's good.Saul Bellow / quote ↗
09UndatedMaybe 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 / quote ↗
10UndatedWhat this means is not a single Tower of Babel plotted in common, but hundreds of thousands of separate beginnings, the length and breadth of America. Energetic people who build against pains and uncertainties, as weaker ones merely hope against them.Saul Bellow / quote ↗
11UndatedThe earth was a grave: our life was lent to it by its elements and had to be returned: a time came when the simple elements seemed to long for release from the complicated forms of life, when every element of every cell said, "Enough!" The planet was our mother and our burial ground. No wonder the human spirit wished to leave. Leave this prolific belly. Leave also this great tomb. Passion for the infinite caused by the terror, by timor mortis, needed material appeasement.Saul Bellow / quote ↗
12UndatedI should have written you a letter, it was too late to make the deaths of my brothers an excuse. Since they died, I wrote a book; why not a letter? A mysterious but truthful answer is that while I can gear myself up to do a novel, letters, real-life communications, are too much for me. I used to rattle them off easily enough; why is the challenge of writing to friends and acquaintances too much for me now? Because I have become such a solitary, and not in the Aristotelian sense: not a beast, not a god. Rather, a loner troubled by longings, incapable of finding a suitable language and despairing at the impossibility of composing messages in a playable key--as if I no longer understood the codes used by the estimable people who wanted to hear from me and would have so much to reply if only the impediments were taken away.Saul Bellow / quote ↗
14UndatedThe noise of the world is so terrible that we can endure it only by being coated with sleep.Saul Bellow / quote ↗
17UndatedShall 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 / quote ↗
18UndatedNo school without spectacular eccentrics and crazy hearts is worth attending.Saul Bellow / quote ↗
19UndatedAfter much effort to live up to a glorious standard there came fatigue, wan hope, and boredom. I experienced extreme boredom. I saw others experiencing it too, many denying, by the way, that any such thing existed. And finally I decided that I would make boredom my subject matter. That I'd study it. That I'd become the world's leading authority on it. March, that was a red-letter day for humanity. What a field! What a domain! Titanic! Promethean! I trembled before it. I was inspired. I couldn't sleep. Ideas came in the night and I wrote them down, volumes of them. Strange that no one had gone after this systematically.Oh, melancholy, yes, but not modern boredom.Saul Bellow / quote ↗
20UndatedYou never have to change anything you get up in the middle of the night to write.Saul Bellow / quote ↗
21UndatedBringing 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 / quote ↗
22UndatedIt 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 / quote ↗
23UndatedThe flesh would shrink and go, the blood would dry, but no one believes in his mind of minds or heart of hearts that the pictures do stop.Saul Bellow / quote ↗
24UndatedEmancipation resulting in madness. Unlimited freedom to choose and play a tremendous variety of roles with a lot of coarse energy.Saul Bellow / quote ↗
