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I pretended not to understand. One of life's hardest jobs, to make a quick understanding slow. I think I succeeded, thought Herzog.

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
Understand
Jobs
Herzog
Thought
Pretended
Make
Succeeded
Think
Quick
Thinking
Slow
Life
Hardest
Understanding

More quotes by Saul Bellow

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The best and purest human beings, from the beginning of time, have understood that life is sacred.
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All human accomplishment has the same origin, identically. Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination.
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Here we write well when we expose frauds and hypocrites. We are great at counting warts and blemishes and weighting feet of clay. In expressing love, we belong among the underdeveloped countries.
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A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.
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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.
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We are all such accidents. We do not make up history and culture. We simply appear, not by our own choice. We make what we can of our condition with the means available. We must accept the mixture as we find it - the impurity of it, the tragedy of it, the hope of it.
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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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Open discussion of many major public questions has for some time now been taboo. We can't open our mouths without being denounced as racists, misogynists, supremacists, imperialists or fascists. As for the media, they stand ready to trash anyone so designated.
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It's goodbye to reality when love sets in.
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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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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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O Lord! he concluded, forgive all these trespasses. Lead me not into Penn Station.
Saul Bellow
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We mustn't forget how quickly the visions of genius become the canned goods of intellectuals.
Saul Bellow
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The stillness in art characterizes prayer, and the eye of the storm.
Saul Bellow
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I must play the instrument I've got.
Saul Bellow
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Psychoanalysis pretends to investigate the Unconscious. The Unconscious by definition is what you are not conscious of. But the Analysts already know what's in it - they should, because they put it all in beforehand.
Saul Bellow
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It's no disgrace to be a private, you know. Socrates was a plain foot soldier, a hoplite.
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.
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Is our species crazy? Plenty of evidence.
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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.
Saul Bellow