574 Quotes by Saul Bellow

Greatness without models? Inconceivable. One could not be the thing itself – Reality. One must be satisfied with symbols. Make it the object of imitation to reach and release the high qualities. Make peace therefore with intermediacy and representations. Otherwise the individual must be the failure he now sees and knows himself to be.

And where was that day? Past and dead. Whose humiliating memories were these? His and not his father’s. What had he to think back on that he could call good? Very, very little. You had to forgive. First, to forgive yourself, and then, general forgiveness.

The poor guy,” she said, and this was remorse over her savage speed and rashness as well as pity for this boy, haunting the mouth of an alley with that toy of swift decisions.

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.

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

So things go on as before with those who think a great deal and effect nothing, and those who think nothing evidently doing it all...

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 art enterprises undertaken in the old way.

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.

My soul is like a pawn shop. I mean it’s filled with unredeemed pleasures, old clarinets, and cameras, and motheaten fur.