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Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death.

Saul Bellow

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Saul Bellow
Age: 89 †
Born: 1915
Born: June 10
Died: 2005
Died: April 5
Author
Essayist
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Solomon Bellows
Death
Boredom
Power
Instrument
Real
Command
Stasis
Terror
Seasoned
Instruments
Tedium
Deep
Combine
Control
Impose
Social
Anguish

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People don't realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature.
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Death is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything
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My face too blind, my mind too limited, my instincts too narrow. But this intensity, doesn't it mean anything?
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I've discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, 'To hell with you.'
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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.
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Losing a parent is something like driving through a plate-glass window. You didn't know it was there until it shattered, and then for years to come you're picking up the pieces -- down to the last glassy splinter.
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I'm afraid there's nothing we can do about the journalists we can only hope that they will die off as the deerflies do towards the end of August.
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Art attempts to find in the universe, in matter as well as in the facts of life, what is fundamental, enduring, essential.
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A man may say, From now on I'm going to speak the truth. But the truth hears him and runs away and hides before he's even done speaking.
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Art is order, made out of the chaos of life.
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I am moneys medium. It passes through me- taxes, insurance, mortgage, child support, rent, legal fees. All this dignified blundering costs plenty.
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The soul has to find and hold its ground against hostile forces, sometimes embodied in ideas which frequently deny its very existence, and which indeed often seem to be trying to annul it altogether.
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Live or die but don't poison everything.
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The sand swallows burst out of their scupper holes in the bluffs and out over the transparent drown of the water, back again to the white, to the brown, to the black, from moving to stock-still sand waves and water-worked woods and roots that hugged and twisted in the sun.
Saul Bellow
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The modern reader (or viewer, or listener: let's include everybody) is perilously overloaded. His attention is, to use the latest lingo,'targeted' by powerful forces? Our consciousness is a staging area, a field of operations for all kinds of enterprises, which make free use of it.
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I seem to have the blind self-acceptance of the eccentric who can't conceive that his eccentricities are not clearly understood.
Saul Bellow
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In politics continental Europe was infantile - horrifying. What America lacked, for all its political stability, was the capacity to enjoy intellectual pleasures as though they were sensual pleasures. This is what Europe offered, or was said to offer.
Saul Bellow
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There's a kind of emptiness at the center of life ... nothing to form your life on, or by.
Saul Bellow
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There is an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for.
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Boredom is the conviction that you can't change ... the shriek of unused capacities.
Saul Bellow