574 Quotes by Saul Bellow

When finally you’re done speaking you’re dumb forever after, and when you’re through stirring you go still, but this is no reason to decline to speak and stir or to be what you are.

Who controls everything? Old men of this type. Without needs. They don’t need therefore they have. I need, therefore I don’t have.

To rip off a piece of lover’s temper was a pleasure in her deepest vein of enjoyment.

Just then his state of being was so curious that he was compelled, himself, to see it – eager, grieving, fantastic, dangerous, crazed and, to the point of death, “comical.” It was enough to make a man pray to God to remove this great, bone-breaking burden of selfhood and self-development, give himself, a failure, back to the species for a primitive cure.

If life is not intoxicating, it’s nothing. Here it’s burn or rot.

He knew he would think better clearer thoughts after bathing in the sea. His mother had believed in the good effects of bathing, but she had died so young.

But the best-treated, most favored and intelligent part of any society is often the most ungrateful. Ingratitude, however, is its social function.

I quit thinking long ago that all old people came to rest from the things they were out for in their younger years.

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?