On the simplest level he could tell you in detail what he felt – what effects an aspirin had on him, what it did to the back of his neck or the inside of his mouth. I was curious about this, because for the life of them most people can’t describe what goes on inside. Alcoholics or druggies are too confused, hypochondriacs are their own terrorists, and most of us are aware only of a metabolic uproar within.

— Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow Quotes

Everybody wanted to be what he was to the limit.

— Saul Bellow

That meeting in the bank you believe in,” my wife, Rosamund, the real wife, later said, after I had described the moment to her. “Why would it be always the worst things which appear to you so real? Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever be able to talk you out of being sadistic to yourself.

— Saul Bellow

But it’s a tiresome preoccupation, self-esteem. Something has to be done to limit the number of people whose opinions can affect us.

— Saul Bellow

Now I was too old to be a pupil, and Ravelstein didn’t believe in adult education. It was far too late for me to Platonize. And what people called culture was nothing but a fancier term for their ignorance.

— Saul Bellow

Free personalities getting no help from either deaf heaven or neutral earth were facing mortally dangerous choices which would determine the future of civilization.

— Saul Bellow

With a little luck, you discover that the people in your life, permanently placed, are able to follow your innermost, deeply concealed motives.

— Saul Bellow

The secret of our being still asks to be unfolded. Only now we understand that worrying at it and ragging it is no use. The first step is to stop these oscillations of consciousness that are keeping me awake. Only, before you command the oscillations to stop, before you check out, you must maneuver yourself into a position in which metaphysical aid can approach.

— Saul Bellow

I imagine, sometimes, that if a film could be made of one’s life, every other frame would be death. It goes so fast we’re not aware of it. Destruction and resurrection in alternate beats of being, but speed makes it seem continuous. But you see, kid, with ordinary consciousness you can’t even begin to know what’s happening.

— Saul Bellow

As a man sees, so he is.” The world as it appears to you classifies your mind.

— Saul Bellow

He turned out to be right. Grielescu had attached himself to the Nazis, not to the milder, Italian form of fascism.

— Saul Bellow

Man is a creature who has something to say about everything under the sun.

— Saul Bellow

Looking for happiness – ought to be prepared for bad results.

— Saul Bellow

I was beginning to think that my bag was lost when I saw it wobbling, solitary, on the long, long line of rollers. It came towards me like an uncorseted woman sauntering over cobblestones.

— Saul Bellow

Do you believe in transcendence downward as well as upward?

— Saul Bellow

Death is good for some people.

— Saul Bellow

Of course, I have known for a long time that we have inherited a mad fear of being slighted or scorned, an exacerbated “honor.” It is not quite the duelist’s madness of a hundred years ago, but we are a people of tantrums nevertheless. A word exchanged in a movie or some other crowd, and we are ready to fly at one another.

— Saul Bellow

Oh, my body, my body! Why have we never really got together as friends? I have loaded it with my vices, like a raft, like a barge.

— Saul Bellow

Oh, death from what we do not want is the most common of all the causes.

— Saul Bellow

You burn the house to roast the pig.

— Saul Bellow

Wait a minute, though: Sammler denied himself the privilege of the high-principled intellectual who must always be applying the purest standards and thumping the rest of his species on the head. When he tried to imagine a just social order, he could not do it. A non-corrupt society? He could not do that either. There were no revolutions that he could remember which had not been made for justice, freedom, and pure goodness. Their last state was always more nihilistic than the first.

— Saul Bellow
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