574 Quotes by Saul Bellow

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

Innately, the female knows how to cripple by sickening a man with guilt. It is a very special destruct, and she sends her curse to make a fellow impotent.

What’s life? Metabolism? That’s what it is for the bugs.

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.

Compulsory veneration is bound to come out as rebellion, hatred, and blasphemy.

And everything soon must change. Men would set their watches by other suns than this. Or time would vanish. We would need no personal names of the old sort in the sidereal future, nothing being fixed. We would be designated by other nouns. Days and nights would belong to the museums. The earth a memorial park, a merry-go-round cemetery. The seas powdering our bones like quartz, making sand, grinding our peace for us by the aeon. Well, that would be good – a melancholy good.

The people who come to evening classes are only ostensibly after culture. Their great need, their hunger, is for good sense, clarity, truth – even an atom of it. People are dying – it is no metaphor – for lack of something real to carry home when day is done.

It means that writers are supposed to make you laugh and cry. That’s what mankind is looking for.

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.