Saul Bellow Quotes & Sayings

There's a kind of emptiness at the center of life ... nothing to form your life on, or by. — Saul Bellow

There's this sense, you know: the impossibility of life, the provisional character and everything, the impossibility of finding anchorage, the insecurity, the hand to mouth existence, the terrible things that life does to you, and well, of course, growing is monotonous, so I try not to grow too much. — Saul Bellow

Everybody I ever knew wanted to show in some way how he held the world together. This only comes from feeling the strain of holding yourself together, and it gets exaggerated into the whole world from the hard labor you put into it. — Saul Bellow

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

I have begun in old age to understand just how oddly we all are put together. We are so proud of our autonomy that we seldom if ever realize how generous we are to ourselves, and just how stingy with others. One of the booby traps of freedom
which is bordered on all sides by isolation
is that we think so well of ourselves. I now see that I have helped myself to the best cuts at life's banquet. — Saul Bellow

I am much better now at ambiguities. — Saul Bellow

A plan relieves you of the torment of choice. — Saul Bellow

The sun was shut up in a cold bottle. — Saul Bellow

I still had the craving that I had given in to all summer long when I had lived on books, to have the reach to grasp both ends of the frame and turn the big image-taking glass to any scene of the world. — Saul Bellow

Some people, if they didn't make it hard for themselves, might fall asleep. — Saul Bellow

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

A fool can throw a stone in a pond that 100 wise men can not get out. — Saul Bellow

A fellow can't predict what he will pick up in the form of influence. — Saul Bellow

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

I quit thinking long ago that all old people came to rest from the things they were out for in their younger years. — Saul Bellow

IF THE GREAT ANDROMEDA GALAXY had to depend on you to hold it up, where would it be now but fallen way to hell? — Saul Bellow

We mustn't forget how quickly the visions of genius become the canned goods of intellectuals. — Saul Bellow

Just because your soul is being torn to pieces doesn't mean that you stop analyzing the phenomena. — Saul Bellow

But now the emphasis has shifted to making it. People have surrendered their personal moral objectives to government or schools or psychologists. It's a change that accelerated with the boom after the war ... There has been a surrender to pragmatism; the true is what makes you successful and the false is what makes you fail. But I wonder what happens to faith, hope and charity in such a situation? People began to form their moral ideas not in the old way but by their professions and guilds; that tends to transfer sin to the corporation. — Saul Bellow

Whoever wants to reach a distant goal must take small steps. — Saul Bellow

Did I say that the world had never had better color? I left something out of account, a limping, crippled consideration which seems to lose ground as you reach beauty and Orizaba flowers, but soon you find it has preceded you. — Saul Bellow

A good man can bear to listen to another talk about himself. — Saul Bellow

In the end you can't save your soul and life by thought. But if you think, the least of the consolation prizes is the world. — Saul Bellow

It hardly does much good to have a complex mind without actually being a philosopher. — Saul Bellow

As the wicked flee when none pursueth, so does the middle-class wrestle when none contendeth. They cried out for freedom, it came down on them in a flood. Nothing remains but a few floating timbers of psychotherapy. — Saul Bellow

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

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

You shouldn't waste your time," he further said. "Don't you see that to do any little thing you have to take an examination, you have to pay a fee and get a card or a diploma? You better get wise to this. If people don't know what you qualify in they'll never know where to place you, and that can be dangerous. You have to get in there and do something for yourself. Even if you're just waiting, you have to know what you're waiting for, you have to specialize. And don't wait too long or you'll be passed by. — Saul Bellow

Oh yes, I got up on my hindlegs like an orator and sounded off to everyone. — Saul Bellow

Because he let the entire world press upon him. For instance? Well, for instance, what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organized power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the late failure of radical hopes. In a society that was no community and devalued the person.Owing to the multiplied power of numbers which made the self negligible. Which spent military billions against foreign enemies but would not pay for order at home. Which permitted savagery and barbarism in its own great cities. At the same time, the pressure of human millions who have discovered what concerted efforts and thoughts can do. — Saul Bellow

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

I've never turned over a fig leaf yet that didn't have a price tag on the other side. — Saul Bellow

How lovely she could be! her face was gay and round, pink, the blue of her eyes was clear. Very different from the terrifying menstrual ice of her rages, the look of the murderess. — Saul Bellow

He wondered at times whether he didn't belong to a class of people secretly convinced they had an arrangement with fate; in return for docility or ingenuous good will they were to be shielded from the worst brutalities in life. — Saul Bellow

Even if I am not the honestest type in the world I don't want to lie more than is average. — Saul Bellow

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

Do we always, always to the point of misery, do a thing? — Saul Bellow

Only self-hatred could lead him to ruin himself because his heart was broken. — Saul Bellow

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

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

Here in the city she had gilded her nails. They shone. And she had put on a velvet dress, this soft red one, which was heavy. The buttons were in the form of seashells. — Saul Bellow

The 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

But the blind did not go around very much. They sat, and didn't seem to have any conversation, and soon you were aware of leisure gone bad. I had learned something of this during Einhorn's days of dirty mental weather. Or of the soul, not the mind, the sick evil of not even knowing why anything should ail you since you're resigned to accept all conditions. — Saul Bellow

In Los Angeles all the loose objects in the country were collected, as if America had been tilted and everything that wasn't tightly screwed down had slid into Southern California. — Saul Bellow

Oh, God," Wilhelm prayed, "Let me out of my trouble. Let me out of my thoughts, and let me do something better with myself. For all the time I have wasted I am very sorry. Let me out of this clutch and into a different life. For I am all balled up. Have mercy. — Saul Bellow

Art is order, made out of the chaos of life. — Saul Bellow

There is much to be said for exotic marriages. If your husband is a bore, it takes years longer to discover. — Saul Bellow

(Socrates) said there were only two possibilities. Either the soul is immortal or, after death, things would be again as blank as they were before we were born. — Saul Bellow

One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away. — Saul Bellow

It was all there. Only he was not through with love and hate elsewhere. — Saul Bellow

...and suffering is another bad habit. — Saul Bellow

If this was so, I was sunk, for by now I was more in love than I could stand, as if some mineral had got into my veins and arteries and I ached, flesh and bones, the way you will on the verge of the grippe. — Saul Bellow

Oh shame, shame! Oh crying shame! How can we? Why do we allow ourselves? What are we doing? The last little room of dirt is waiting. Without windows. So for God's sake make a move, Henderson, put forth effort. You, too, will die of this pestilence. Death will annihilate you and nothing will remain, and there will be nothing left but junk ... While something still is
now! For the sake of all, get out! — Saul Bellow

I don't know how it all at once came to me to talk a lot, tell jokes, kick up, and suddenly have views. When it was time to have them, there was no telling how I picked them from the air. — Saul Bellow

We are all such accidents. We do not make up history and culture. We simply appear, not by our own choice. We make what we can of our condition with the means available. We must accept the mixture as we find it - the impurity of it, the tragedy of it, the hope of it. — Saul Bellow

But privately when things got very bad I often looked into books to see whether I could find some helpful words, and one day I read, "The forgiveness of sins is perpetual and righteousness first is not required." This impressed me so deeply that I went around saying it to myself. But then I forgot which book it was. — Saul Bellow

In every community there is a class of people profoundly dangerous to the rest. I don't mean the criminals. For them we have punitive sanctions. I mean the leaders. Invariably the most dangerous people seek the power. While in the parlors of indignation the right-thinking citizen brings his heart to a boil. (p. 51) — Saul Bellow

Mr. Benjamin shrugged his shoulders. "We have to live today," he said. "If you had a son, Harkavy, you'd want him to have a college education. Who's going to wait for the Messiah? They tell a story about a little town in the old country. It was out of the way, in a valley, so the Jews were afraid the Messiah would come and miss them, and they built a high tower and hired one of the town beggars to sit in it all day long. A friend of his meets this beggar and says, 'How do you like your job, Baruch?' So he says, 'It doesn't pay much, but I think it's steady work. — Saul Bellow

I must be a little crazy." She said it in a husky and quiet tone. "I must be, I have to admit. But I thought if I could get through to one other person I could get through to more. So people wouldn't tire me, and so I wouldn't be afraid of them. Because my feeling can't be people's fault, so much. They don't make it. Well, I believed it must be you who could do this for me. And you could. I was so happy to find you. I thought you knew all about what you could do and you were so lucky and so special. That's why it's not just jealousy. I didn't want you to come back. I'm sorry you're here now. You're not special. You're like everybody else. You get tired easily. I don't want to see you any more. — Saul Bellow

The soul has to find and hold its ground against hostile forces, sometimes embodied in ideas which frequently deny its very existence, and which indeed often seem to be trying to annul it altogether. — Saul Bellow

What use was war without also love? — Saul Bellow

There are times when the most practical thing is to lie down. — Saul Bellow

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life. — Saul Bellow

One must bear in mind the odd angle or slant that the rays of love have to take in order to reach a heart like mine. — Saul Bellow

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

Imagination is a force of nature. — Saul Bellow

It wasn't that he was specially ungenerous but that he put things off to give his generosity a longer and more significant route. — Saul Bellow

You do all you can to humanize and familiarize the world, and suddenly it becomes more strange than ever. The living are not what they were, the dead die again and again, and at last for good. — Saul Bellow

I don't think the struggles of desire can ever be won. Ages of longing and willing, willing and longing, and how have they ended? In a draw, dust and dust. — Saul Bellow

Many common lies and hypocrisies are like that, just out of the harmony of the moment. — Saul Bellow

Towards the end of your life you have something like a pain schedule to fill out - a long schedule like a federal document, only it's your pain schedule. Endless categories. First, physical causes - like arthritis, gallstones, menstrual cramps. New category, injured vanity, betrayal, swindle, injustice. But the hardest items of all have to do with love. The question then is: So why does everybody persist? If love cuts them up so much ... — Saul Bellow

Not that life should end is so terrible in itself, but that it should end with so many disappointments in the essential. — Saul Bellow

Human consciousness at present is a sort of battlefield. And you know what Tolstoy tells us about battles in War and Peace. Nobody really knows what is going on during a battle ... — Saul Bellow

Can we find nothing good to say about TV? Well, yes, it brings scattered solitaries into a sort of communion. TV allows your isolated American to think that he participates in the life of the entire country. It does not actually place him in a community, but his heart is warmed with the suggestion (on the whole false) that there is a community somewhere in the vicinity and that his atomized consciousness will be drawn back toward the whole. — Saul Bellow

On Broadway it was still bright afternoon and the gassy air was almost motionless under the leaden spokes of sunlight, and sawdust footprints lay about the doorways of butcher shops and fruit stores. And the great, great crowd, the inexhaustible current of millions of every race and kind pouring out, pressing round, of every race and genius, possessors of every human secret, antique and future, in every face the refinement of one particular motive or essence - I labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want. Faster, much faster than any man could make the tally. — Saul Bellow

Art attempts to find in the universe, in matter as well as in the facts of life, what is fundamental, enduring, essential. — Saul Bellow

In here, the human bosom
mine, yours, everybody's
there isn't just one soul. There's a lot of souls. But there are two main ones, the real soul and a pretender soul. Now! Every man realizes that he has to love something or somebody. He feels that he must go outward. 'If thou canst not love, what art thou?' Are you with me? — Saul Bellow

Goodness is achieved not in a vacuum, but in the company of other men, attended by love. — Saul Bellow

Of course! Easily or not at all. People were mad to be knocking themselves out over difficulties because they thought difficulty was a sign of the right thing. — Saul Bellow

Well, what o you want?" I said. "I am the type of guy who couldn't survive without disfigurement. Life has worked me over. It wasn't just the war, either ... I got a bad wound, you know. But the shots of life ... " I gave myself a bang on the breast. "Right here! You know what I mean, King? — Saul Bellow

You have, like the external world, your own phenomena inside. — Saul Bellow

A man should be able to hear, and to bear, the worst that could be said of him. — Saul Bellow

A good American makes propaganda for whatever existence has forced him to become. — Saul Bellow

The ocean was waiting with grand and bitter provocations, as if it invited you to think how deep it was, how much colder than your blood or saltier, or to outguess it, to tell which were its feints or passes and which its real intentions, meaning business. — Saul Bellow

Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death. — Saul Bellow

I am deeply moved when I write. I get turned on by it. I've never used any drugs for stimulation. I don't use words loosely. When I'm working and the right word comes, there is an answering resonance within me. There is also a hardness of intention that goes with it. There is no idleness in it. — Saul Bellow

I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction. — Saul Bellow

I am a true adorer of life, and if I can't reach as high as the face of it, I plant my kiss somewhere lower down. Those who understand will require no further explanation. — Saul Bellow

I WAS NO CHILD NOW, neither in age nor in protectedness, and I was thrown for fair on the free spinning of the world. If you think, and some do, that continual intimacy, familiarity, and love can result in falsehood, this being thrown on the world may be a very desirable even if sad thing. What Christ meant when he called his mother "Woman." That after all she was like any woman. That in any true life you must go and be exposed outside the small circle that encompasses two or three heads in the same history of love. Try and stay, though, inside. See how long you can. — Saul Bellow

O Lord! he concluded, forgive all these trespasses. Lead me not into Penn Station. — Saul Bellow

There were people who believed Herzog was rather simple, that his humane feelings were childish. That he had been spared the destruction of certain sentiments as the pet goose is spared the axe. — Saul Bellow

She was what we used to call a suicide blonde
dyed by her own hand. — Saul Bellow

In this view the body itself, with its two arms and vertical length, was compared to the Cross, on which you knew the agony of consciousness and separate being. — Saul Bellow

How we all love extreme cases and apocalypses, fires, drownings, stranglings, and the rest of it. The bigger our mild, basically ethical, safe middle classes grow the more radical excitement is in demand. Mild or moderate truthfulness or accuracy seems to have no pull at all. — Saul Bellow

As for Sono, she was trying to instruct him, to show how a man should treat a woman. The pride of the peacock, the lust of the goat, and the wrath of the lion are the glory and wisdom of God. — Saul Bellow

So things go on as before with those who think a great deal and effect nothing, and those who think nothing evidently doing it all... — Saul Bellow

To rip off a piece of lover's temper was a pleasure in her deepest vein of enjoyment. — Saul Bellow

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

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

Anxiety destroys scale, and suffering makes us lose perspective. — Saul Bellow