Saul Bellow Quotes

Between human beings there are only two alternatives, either brotherhood or crime.

Also, he was smoking a cigar, and when a man is smoking a cigar, wearing a hat, he has an advantage; it is harder to find out how he feels.

But what is the philosophy of this generation? Not God is dead, that point was passed long ago. Perhaps it should be stated Death is God. This generation thinks – and this is its thought of thoughts –...

Everybody pays the heart lip service, of course, but everybody is more familiar with the absence of love than with its presence and gets so used to the feeling of emptiness that it becomes normal. You...

I want to tell you, don't marry suffering. Some people do. They get married to it, and sleep and eat together, just as husband and wife. If they go with joy they think it's adultery.

It is my childish mind that thinks people are ready to give it just because you need it.

It is wrong to turn a man (a subject) into a thing (an object). Bymeans of spiritual dialogue, the I-It relationship becomes an I-Thourelationship. God comes and goes in man's soul. And men come and g...

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...

There's the most extraordinary, unheard of poetry buried in America, but none of the conventional means known to culture can even begin to extract it...the agony is too deep, the disorder too big for...

It's usually the selfish people who are loved the most. They do what you deny yourself, and you love them for it. You give them your heart.

He concluded,

As long as I could keep improving my mind, I figured, I was doing okay.

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...

Every twenty years or so the earth renews itself in young maidens. You know what I mean? Her cheeks had the perfect form that belongs to the young; her hair was kinky gold. Her teeth were white and po...

For Christ's sake don't cry, you idiot! Live or die, but don't poison everything.

His mind took one of its odd jumps. He opened a clean page in his grimy notebook, and in the twig-divided shade of a wild cherry, infested with tent caterpillars, he began to make notes for a poem.

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

In the peculiar fate of people that makes them fat and rich, when this happens very swiftly there is the menace of the dreamy state that plunders their reality. Let's say that anyway old age and death...

Ninety per cent of life is a nightmare, do you think I am going to get it rounded up to hundred per cent?

Theirs was not a marriage that could last. Madeleine had never loved him. She was telling him that. 'It's painful to have to say I never loved you. I never will love you, either,' she said. 'So there'...