My very fingertips rehearsed how they would work the keys of the trumpet, imagination’s trumpet, when I got ready to blow it at last. The peals of that brass would be heard beyond the earth, out in space itself. When that Messiah, that savior faculty the imagination was roused, finally we could look again with open eyes upon the whole shining earth.

— Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow Quotes

What 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

This rest and well-being were only a momentary difference in the strange lining or variable silk between life and void.

— Saul Bellow

Slavery has never really been abolished. More people are enslaved to different things than you can shake a stick at.

— Saul Bellow

And I saw Clara Spohr coming from the Oyster Bar or being washed forth into this sea, dismasted, clinging to her soul in the shipwreck of her beauty.

— Saul Bellow

Why should one man have the power to damage all nature or pollute the entire world?

— Saul Bellow

It means that writers are supposed to make you laugh and cry. That’s what mankind is looking for.

— Saul Bellow

History is the history of cruelty, not love, as soft men think.

— Saul Bellow

Nature is a deep imitator. And as man is the prince of organisms he is master of adaptations. He is the artist of suggestions. He himself is his principle work of art, in the body working in the flesh. What miracle! What triumph! Also, what a disaster! What tears are to be shed!

— Saul Bellow

One of life’s hardest jobs, to make a quick understanding slow.

— Saul Bellow

I am giving up the violin. I guess I will never reach my object through it,” to raise my spirit from the earth, to leave the body of this death. I was very stubborn. I wanted to raise myself into another world. My life and deeds were a prison.

— Saul Bellow

You take too many pills of every kind – first stimulants and then depressants, anodynes followed by analeptics, until the poor organism doesn’t know what’s happened.

— Saul Bellow

The people who come to evening classes are only ostensibly after culture. Their great need, their hunger, is for good sense, clarity, truth – even an atom of it. People are dying – it is no metaphor – for lack of something real to carry home when day is done.

— Saul Bellow

Forgetfully, Wilhelm traveled for miles in second gear; he was seldom in the right lane and he neither gave signals nor watched for lights.

— Saul Bellow

Why, it was a crying matter, no fooling, to anyone who might know which side was up, that here was I trying to refuse to lead a disappointed life.

— Saul Bellow

His marriage, too, had been like that. Through such decisions somehow his life had taken form. And so, from the moment when he tasted the peculiar flavor of fatality in Dr. Tamkin, he could no longer keep back the money.

— Saul Bellow

Americans find it hard to believe that foreigners are unalterably foreign, for they have seen generations of immigrants who became Americans. But old cultures are impermeable and exclusive – none more so than the French.

— Saul Bellow

Odd that mankind’s benefactors should be amusing people. In America at least this is often the case. Anyone who wants to govern the country has to entertain.

— Saul Bellow

He was an extremely correct person except that he never shaved in the morning, not caring, probably, how he looked to the fumblers and the old people and the operators and the gamblers and the idlers of Broadway uptown.

— Saul Bellow

A columnist on the Daily News said that to Ravelstein money was something you threw from the rear platform of speeding trains.

— Saul Bellow

But oh, unreality! Unreality, unreality! That has been my scheme for a troubled but eternal life.

— Saul Bellow
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