Quotes by Saul Bellow

“. . . [T]o live in an inspired condition, to know truth, to be free, to love another, to consummate existence, to abide with death in clarity of consciousness - without which, racing and conniving ...”

“He 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 acti...”

“Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.”

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

“I am willing without further exercise in pain to open my heart. And this needs no doctrine or theology of suffering. We love apocalypses too much, and crisis ethics and florid extremism with its th...”

“I venture to say Kierkegaard meant that truth has lost its force with us and horrible pain and evil must teach it to us again, the eternal punishments of Hell will have to regain their reality befo...”

“Strict and literal truthfulness was a trivial game and might even be a disagreeable neurotic affliction.”

“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.”

“What 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 u...”

“Just then his state of being was so curious that he was compelled , himself, to see it -- eager, grieving, fantastic, dangerous, crazed and, to the point of death, "comical." It was enough to make ...”

“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...”

“I 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 ...”

“What did Danton lose his head for, or why was there a Napoleon, if it wasn't to make a nobility of us all?”

“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...”

“I am a prisoner of perception, a compulsory witness.”

“If 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...”

“Every treasure is guarded by dragons. That's how you can tell it's valuable.”

“The noise of the world is so terrible that we can endure it only by being coated with sleep.”

“Brother raises a hand against brother and son against father (how terrible!) and the father also against son. And moreover it is a continuity-matter, for if the father did not strike the son, they ...”

“A professor from UBC observed that he agreed with Alexander Pope about the ultimate unreality of evil. Seen from the highest point of metaphysics. To a rational mind, nothing bad ever really happen...”