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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.

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
Live
Much
Grip
People
Insightful
Among
Realize
Realizing
Nature
Ideas

More quotes by Saul Bellow

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I labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want. Faster, much faster than any man could make the tally.
Saul Bellow
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One of the booby traps of freedom - which is bordered on all sides by isolation - is that we think so well of ourselves. I now see that I have helped myself to the best cuts at life's banquet.
Saul Bellow
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Boredom is the conviction that you can't change ... the shriek of unused capacities.
Saul Bellow
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With one long breath, caught and held in his chest, he fought his sadness over his solitary life. Don't cry, you idiot! Live or die, but don't poison everything.
Saul Bellow
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A human soul devoid of longing was a soul deformed, deprived of its highest good, sick unto death.
Saul Bellow
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How could I be anything but a dissenter? Who wants the opinion of a group?
Saul Bellow
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People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.
Saul Bellow
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The two real problems in life are boredom and death.
Saul Bellow
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Each man has his own batch of poems.
Saul Bellow
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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.
Saul Bellow
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You're all alone when you're a writer. Sometimes you just feel you need a humanity bath. Even a ride on the subway will do that. But it's much more interesting to talk about books. After all, that's what life used to be for writers: they talk books, politics, history, America. Nothing has replaced that.
Saul Bellow
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For the first time in history, the human species as a whole has gone into politics. Everyone is in the act, and there is no telling what may come of it.
Saul Bellow
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The more realistic you are the more you threaten the grounds of your own art.
Saul Bellow
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I must play the instrument I've got.
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.
Saul Bellow
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You have one of two choices. Either you can panic and start making frantic attempts to reform under the glare of these awful critical eyes, or you can just say, The hell with you! I know what I'm doing. If you don't yet, it's because you haven't given me an attentive reading.
Saul Bellow
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The ocean was waiting with grand and bitter provocations, as if it invited you to think how deep it was, how much colder than your blood or saltier, or to outguess it, to tell which were its feints or passes and which its real intentions, meaning business.
Saul Bellow
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There was a disturbance in my heart, a voice that spoke there and said, I want, I want, I want! It happened every afternoon, and when I tried to suppress it it got even stronger.
Saul Bellow
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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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Art is order, made out of the chaos of life.
Saul Bellow