Top 450 Saul Bellow Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

252. “Fun comes hard – like, alas, its prarens, pleasure and happiness, whom we have to pursue.”

— Saul Bellow

253. “Somewhere in every intellectual is a dumb prick.”

— Saul Bellow

254. “Creative is nature. Rapid. Lavish. Inspirational. It shapes leaves. It rolls the waters of the earth. Man is the chief of this. All creations are his just inheritance.”

— Saul Bellow

255. “Seashores are good for madmen – provided they’re not too mad.”

— Saul Bellow

256. “Whenever I write a dramatic poem I can’t understand why the characters should ever want to be anything but poets themselves.”

— Saul Bellow

257. “My next idea was how nothing was more dreadful than to be forced by another to feel his persuasion as to how horrible it is to exist, how deathly to hope, and taste the same despair. How of all the impositions this was the worst imposition. Not just to be as they make you but to feel as they dictate. If you didn’t have the strongest alliance you surely would despair at last and your mouth would drink blood.”

— Saul Bellow

258. “Everyone got bitterness in his chosen thing. It might be in the end that the chosen thing that the chosen thing in itself is bitterness because to arrive at the chosen thing needs courage, because it’s intense, and intensity is what the feeble humanity of us can’t take for long. And also the chosen thing can’t be one that we already have, since what we already have there isn’t much use or respect for.”

— Saul Bellow

259. “I don’t know exactly how it’s done. I let it alone a good deal.”

— Saul Bellow

260. “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

261. “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

262. “History, memory – that is what makes us human, that, and our knowledge of death: ‘by man came death’. For knowledge of death makes us wish to extend our lives at the expense of others. And this is the root of the struggle for power.”

— Saul Bellow

263. “Charlotte came in herself, like a big bridal edifice in her veil and other lace, carrying long-stemmed flowers. With her there wasn’t much hiding of the behind-the-scenes of life to keep a man in the bonds of love, as Lucretius advises when he tells you to make allowances for mortality. You only had to see her practical mouth to know everything about mortality was admitted in advance, though she did for form’s sake all that other women do. Her frankness gave her a kind of nobility.”

— Saul Bellow

264. “First these people murdered you, then they forced you to brood over their crimes.”

— Saul Bellow

265. “There haven’t been civilizations without cities. But what about cities without civilizations? An inhuman thing, if possible, to have so many people together who beget nothing on one another. No, but it is not possible, and the dreary begets its own fire, and so this never happens.”

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

267. “Keep out of this, please, will you, Mildred? A child isn’t a toy.” “Oh,” she said, “they grow up. Time does it more than fathers and mothers. The parents take too much credit.”

— Saul Bellow

268. “I’ve had all the monstrosity I want.”

— Saul Bellow

269. “Take the fact that people generally were full of loathing and it cost them an effort to look at one another. Mostly they wanted to be let alone. And they dug for unreality more than for treasure, unreality being last great hope because then they could doubt that what they knew about themselves was true.”

— Saul Bellow

270. “Do we always, always to the point of misery, do a thing?”

— Saul Bellow

271. “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.”

— Saul Bellow

272. “He had come into a view of mutability, and I too could see that one is only ostensibly born to remain in specified limits.”

— Saul Bellow

273. “The first undressing of two lovers is a most special event.”

— Saul Bellow

274. “Alternatives, and particularly desirable alternatives, grow only on imaginary trees.”

— Saul Bellow

275. “Was she not so simple and free of ulterior motives as she looked? Well, neither was I.”

— Saul Bellow

276. “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

277. “We took the coal-and-ice dealers into taverns and drank beer and swapped talk, in those sleepy and dark with heat joints where the very flies crept rather than flew, seeming doped by the urinal camphors and malt sourness, and from the heated emptiness and woodblock-knocking of the baseball broadcast that gave only more constriction to the unlocatable, undiagnosed wrong.”

— Saul Bellow

278. “To accept too many favors from Ramona was dangerous. He might have to pay with his freedom. Of course he didn’t need that freedom now; he needed a rest. Still, after resting, he might want his freedom again. He wasn’t sure of that, either. But it was a possibility.”

— Saul Bellow

279. “Anyway, it was an age of spiritual exhaustion – all the old dreams were dreamed out. I was angry; I burned like that furnace; reading more, sick with rage.”

— Saul Bellow

280. “These were his friends of the business community; a man in business had to have such, and he visited and entertained but neither touched nor was touched, ever.”

— Saul Bellow

281. “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

282. “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

283. “In the depths of a man’s being there was something that responded with a quack to such perfume. Quack!”

— Saul Bellow

284. “I wonder whether there will ever be enough tranquility under modern circumstances to allow our contemporary Wordsworth to recollect anything. I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness that 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

285. “I have, perhaps, a slave-like constitution which is too easily restrained by bonds; it then becomes rebellious and bursts out in a comic revolution.”

— Saul Bellow

286. “What use was war without also love?”

— Saul Bellow

287. “Death discredits. Survival is the whole success. The voice of the dead goes away. There isn’t any memory. The power that’s established fills the earth and destiny is whatever survives, so whatever is is right.”

— Saul Bellow

288. “You have to have the power to employ pain, to repent, to be illuminated, you must have the opportunity and even the time.”

— Saul Bellow

289. “There’s nothing worse than being confused, too, in addition to being unlucky.”

— Saul Bellow

290. “Only self-hatred could lead him to ruin himself because his heart was “broken.”

— Saul Bellow

291. “Hapiness can only be found if you can free yourself of all other distractions.”

— Saul Bellow

292. “If you could arrange to avoid that routine job-world, you were an intellectual or an artist. Too restless, tremorous, agitated, too mad to sit at a desk eight hours a day, you needed an institution – a higher institution.”

— Saul Bellow

293. “Nobody should pretend to be always one hundred per cent honest. I wish I knew how to be seventy, sixty per cent.” I swore she must be one hundred and ten, two hundred.”

— Saul Bellow

294. “You saw how he put his paws over my face so I couldn’t breathe?” she said. “God made him to be a butcher. Why did he become a dentist? His hands are too heavy. The touch is everything to a dentist. If his hands aren’t right he shouldn’t be let practice. But his wife worked hard to send him through school and make a dentist of him. And I must go to him and be burned because of it.”

— Saul Bellow

295. “What was the matter that pureness of feeling couldn’t be kept up? I see I met those writers in the big book of utopias at a peculiar time. In those utopias, set up by hopes and art, how could you overlook the part of nature or be sure you could keep the feelings up?”

— Saul Bellow

296. “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

297. “It’s no small matter to become rich and famous by saying exactly what you think – to say it in your own words, without compromise.”

— Saul Bellow

298. “Mine was the sort of heart that had to overcome melancholy and free itself from many depressing weights.”

— Saul Bellow

299. “Even worse is the discovery that one has been living out certain greeting-card sentiments, with ribbons of middle-class virtue tied in a bow around one’s heart.”

— Saul Bellow

300. “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