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Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow Quotes

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Famous Saul Bellow Quotes

“The autumn leaves were pulverized and the fragrance of leaf-decay was pleasant. The air was empty but good. As the sun went down the landscape was like the still frame of an old movie on sepia film. Sunset. A red wash spreading from remote Pennsylvania, sheep bells clunking, dogs in the brown barnyards. I was trained in Chicago to make something of such a scant setting. In Chicago you became a connoisseur of the near-nothing. With a clear eye I looked at a clear scene, I appreciated the red sumac, the white rocks, the rust of the weeds, the wig of green on the bluff over the crossroads.”

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Book:Humboldt's Gift
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“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. As megatons of water shape organisms on the ocean floor. As tides polish stones. As winds hollow cliffs. The beautiful supermachinery opening a new life for innumerable mankind. Would you deny them the right to exist? Would you ask them to labor and go hungry while you yourself enjoyed old-fashioned Values? You—you yourself are a child of this mass and a brother to all the rest. or else an ingrate, dilettante, idiot. There, Herzog, thought Herzog, since you ask for the instance, is the way it runs.”

ScienceDeclineMachineryObscurityModernism
Book:Herzog
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“Well, there is a piece of famous advice, grand advice even if it is German, to forget what you can't bear. The strong can forget, can shut out history. Very good. Even if it is self-flattery to speak of strength--these aesthetic philosophers, they take a posture, but power sweeps postures away. Still, it's true you can't go on transposing one nightmare into another, Nietzsche was certainly right about that. The tender-minded must harden themselves. Is this world nothing but a barren lump of coke? No, no, but what sometimes seems a system of prevention, a denial of what every human being knows. I love my children, but I am the world to them, and bring them nightmares. I had this child by my enemy. And I love her. The sight of her, the odor of her hair, this minute, makes me tremble with love. Isn't it mysterious how I love the child of my enemy? But a man doesn't need happiness for himself. No, he can put up with any amount of torment--with recollections, with his own familiar evils, despair. And this is the unwritten history of man, his unseen, negative accomplishment, his power to do without gratification for himself provided there is something great, something into which his being, and all beings can go. He does not need meaning as long as such intensity has scope. Because then it is self-evident; it is meaning.”

LoveChildrenPhilosophyGodHateFearEnemyStrengthWeaknessSmellMotherhoodDenialDelusionSelf MotivationParenthoodFatherhoodGritNietzscheOdourWhy The World Needs Jesus
Book:Herzog
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“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.”

ThinkingWellsHeartDoeCountryWholeCommunityConsciousnessTelevisionTvsIsolatedCommunionSuggestionsVicinity
Book:It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future
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“A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life. It tells us that for every human being there is a diversity of existences, that the single existence is itself an illusion in part, that these many existences signify something, tend to something, fulfill something; it promises us meaning, harmony, and even justice.”

HumansJusticeHuman BeingsExistenceNovelPromiseDiversityIllusionHarmonyImpressionBalancedMultitudesBeing There
Author:Saul Bellow
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“It seems hard for the American people to believe that anything could be more exciting than the times themselves. What we read daily and view on the TV has thrust imagined forms into the shadow. We are staggeringly rich in facts, in things, and perhaps, like the nouveau riche of other ages, we want our wealth faithfully reproduced by the artist.”

PeopleWantBelieveHardFactsSeemsAgeFormArtistWealthViewsRichTvsShadowExcitingThrustNouveau Riche
Book:It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future
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“It's hard for writers to get on with their work if they are convinced that they owe a concrete debt to experience and cannot allow themselves the privilege of ranging freely through social classes and professional specialties. A certain pride in their own experience, perhaps a sense of the property rights of others in their experience, holds them back.”

IfsHardCertainSocialClassRightsPridePropertyPrivilegeDebtConvincedConcreteProperty RightsSocial ClassSpecialty
Book:It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future
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“In an age of enormities, the emotions are naturally weakened. We are continually called upon to have feelings - about genocide, for instance, or about famine or the blowing up of passenger planes - and we are all aware that we are incapable of reacting appropriately. A guilty consciousness of emotional inadequacy or impotence makes people doubt their own human weight.”

PeopleHumansFeelingsAgeEmotionConsciousnessDoubtEmotionalWeightGuiltyInstancePlanesGenocideIncapableFaminePassengersReactingImpotenceInadequacyBlowing Up
Book:It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future
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“In politics continental Europe was infantile - horrifying. What America lacked, for all its political stability, was the capacity to enjoy intellectual pleasures as though they were sensual pleasures. This is what Europe offered, or was said to offer.”

SaidAmericaPoliticalEnjoyPleasureOffersIntellectualEuropeCapacitySensualStabilityInfantileContinentalSensual Pleasure
Book:It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future
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“A millennial belief in a Holy God may have the effect of deepening the soul, but it is also obviously archaic, and modern influences would presently bring me up to date and reveal how antiquated my origins were. To turn away from those origins, however, has always seemed to me an utter impossibility. It would be a treason to my first consciousness to un-Jew myself.”

FirstsMaySoulWould BeTurnsBeliefConsciousnessInfluenceModernEffectsHolyJewImpossibilityTreasonMillennialsUp To DateHoly God
Book:There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction
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