Top 450 Saul Bellow Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “Those are the only two classes of people there are. Some want to live, but the great majority don’t.”

— Saul Bellow

352. “Cynicism was bread and meat to everyone. And irony, too. Maybe it couldn’t be helped. It was probably even necessary.”

— Saul Bellow

353. “But then why shouldn’t he write the dead? He lived with them as much as with the living – perhaps more; and besides, his letters to the living were increasingly mental, and anyway, to the Unconscious, what was death? Dreams did not recognize it.”

— Saul Bellow

354. “But you find people who have their luck and take the credit for it, too – all brains and personality, when all that happened was that they were handed a bucket when it rained.”

— Saul Bellow

355. “Death is good for some people.”

— Saul Bellow

356. “I may be old enough for my second childhood, but at least the first is well behind me.”

— Saul Bellow

357. “I felt singularly ashamed of not being a doctor.”

— Saul Bellow

358. “The elderly ladies were rouged and mascaraed and hennaed and used blue hair rinse and eye shadow and wore costume jewelry, and many of them were proud and stared at you with expressions that did not belong to their age.”

— Saul Bellow

359. “Didn’t Margaret know that he was nearly at the end of his rope? Of course. Her instinct told her that this was her opportunity, and she was giving him the works.”

— Saul Bellow

360. “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

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

— Saul Bellow

362. “So deformity has overtaken love and love is a power that can’t let us alone. It can’t because we owe our existence to acts of love performed before us, because love is a standing debt of the soul.”

— Saul Bellow

363. “He turned out to be right. Grielescu had attached himself to the Nazis, not to the milder, Italian form of fascism.”

— Saul Bellow

364. “And I thought there was altogether too much of this to live with. Better forget it, in part. The Ganges is there with its demons and lords; but you have a right also, and merely, to wash your feet and do your personal laundry in it. Or even if you had a good car it would take more than a lifetime to do a tour of all the Calvaries.”

— Saul Bellow

365. “Not that long disease, my life, but that long convalescence, my life. The liberal-bourgeois revision, the illusion of improvement, the poison of hope.”

— Saul Bellow

366. “Never has any country given its people so many toys to play with or sent such highly gifted individuals to the remotest corners of idleness, as close as possible to the frontiers of pain.”

— Saul Bellow

367. “You’re very sympathetic, even the young girls feel that. You’d make a good provider. But they go more for the other types.”

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

369. “You are lazy, disgraceful, tougher than you think but not yet a dead loss. In part you are humanly okay. We are supposed to do something for our kind. Don’t get frenzied about money. Overcome your greed. Better luck with women. Last of all – remember: we are not natural beings but supernatural beings.”

— Saul Bellow

370. “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

371. “Without teaching, Jewry was an impossibility.”

— Saul Bellow

372. “Free personalities getting no help from either deaf heaven or neutral earth were facing mortally dangerous choices which would determine the future of civilization.”

— Saul Bellow

373. “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

374. “An old man, disappointed, of failing strength, may try to reinvigorate himself by means of anger.”

— Saul Bellow

375. “In full tumult the great afternoon current raced for Columbus Circle, where the mouth of midtown stood open and the skyscrapers gave back the yellow fire of the sun.”

— Saul Bellow

376. “In the language of evolutionary theory Bryan was a dead branch of the life-tree.”

— Saul Bellow

377. “Because of unhappiness, at a certain age, the brain starts to die back.”

— Saul Bellow

378. “Certain expressions burn people up, and especially the expression of wisdom, which can lead you straight to the loony bin. You will have earned it!”

— Saul Bellow

379. “I believe Uncle’s intuition to have been that plants functioned as sense organs, collecting cosmic data for the earth itself.”

— Saul Bellow

380. “Of course, I have known for a long time that we have inherited a mad fear of being slighted or scorned, an exacerbated “honor.” It is not quite the duelist’s madness of a hundred years ago, but we are a people of tantrums nevertheless. A word exchanged in a movie or some other crowd, and we are ready to fly at one another.”

— Saul Bellow

381. “You had to talk with yourself in the daytime and reason with yourself at night. Who else was there to talk to in a city like New York?”

— Saul Bellow

382. “He tried to make his lust comical, to show how absurd it all was, easily the most wretched form of human struggle, the very essence of slavery.”

— Saul Bellow

383. “Roumanian is an easy language. You just add a tl to everything.”

— Saul Bellow

384. “This is the way of the weak; quiet and fair.”

— Saul Bellow

385. “It is better to die what you are than to live a stranger forever.”

— Saul Bellow

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

— Saul Bellow

387. “More than human, can you have any use for life? Less than human, you don’t either.”

— Saul Bellow

388. “Man is a creature who has something to say about everything under the sun.”

— Saul Bellow

389. “You see, I understand what it is when the lonely person begins to feel like an animal.”

— Saul Bellow

390. “To have assumed, for instance, that the deterioration of language and its debasement was tantamount to dehumanization led straight to cultural fascism.”

— Saul Bellow

391. “Because you’re a highbrow and married a highbrow broad. Somewhere in every intellectual is a dumb prick. You guys can’t answer your own questions –.”

— Saul Bellow

392. “He was looking for the Knight of Faith, the real prodigy. That real prodigy, having set its relations with the infinite, was entirely at home in the finite. Able to carry the jewel of faith, making the motions of the infinite, and as a result needing nothing but the finite and the usual. Whereas others sought the extraordinary in the world. Or wished to be what was gaped at.”

— Saul Bellow

393. “Even in a few minutes’ conversation, do you realize how many times what you feel is converted before it comes out as what you say?”

— Saul Bellow

394. “They did not know how much he cared for them. No. It hurt him greatly and he blamed Margaret for turning them against him. She wanted to ruin him, while she wore the mask of kindness.”

— Saul Bellow

395. “But how we love looking fine in the eyes of the world – how beautiful are the old when they are doing a snow job!”

— Saul Bellow

396. “With a little luck, you discover that the people in your life, permanently placed, are able to follow your innermost, deeply concealed motives.”

— Saul Bellow

397. “But I’m thinking of the great death populations of the Gulags and the German labor camps. Why does the century – I don’t know how else to put it – underwrite so much destruction? There is a lameness that comes over all of us when we consider these facts.”

— Saul Bellow

398. “We are survivors, in this age, so theories of progress ill become us, because we are intimately acquainted with the costs. To realize that you are a survivor is a shock.”

— Saul Bellow

399. “Gratitude! I was deeply grateful. But the politic gratitude of weakness, of the sufferer, furious underneath.”

— Saul Bellow

400. “It seemed necessary for him to lift one shoulder in order to put his hand into his jacket pocket.”

— Saul Bellow