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The writer cannot make the seas of distraction stand still, but he [or she] can at times come between the madly distracted and the distractions.

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
Still
Distracted
Come
Distraction
Writing
Sea
Make
Writer
Stand
Times
Madly
Cannot
Distractions
Stills
Seas

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If I had a child of school age, I would send him to one of the Waldorf Schools.
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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.
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A man is only as good as what he loves.
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Boredom is the conviction that you can't change ... the shriek of unused capacities.
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I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos.
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A writer is in the broadest sense a spokesman of his community. Through him that community comes to know its heart. Without such knowledge, how long can it survive?
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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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An exchange occurs between man and woman. Love and thought complete each other in the human pair, and something like an exchange of souls takes place, according to the divine plan.
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People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.
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Only self-hatred could lead him to ruin himself because his heart was broken.
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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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It seems, after all that there are no nonpeculiar people.
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Retirement is an illusion. Not a reward but a mantrap. The bankrupt underside of success. A shortcut to death. Golf courses are too much like cemeteries.
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I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.
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There is simply too much to think about.
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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.
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I blame myself for not often enough seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary. Somewhere in his journals, Dostoyevky remarks that a writer can begin anywhere, at the most commonplace thing, scratch around in it long enough, pry and dig away long enough, and lo!, soon he will hit upon the marvelous.
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There are times when the most practical thing is to lie down.
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In here, the human bosom -- mine, yours, everybody's -- there isn't just one soul. There's a lot of souls. But there are two main ones, the real soul and a pretender soul. Now! Every man realizes that he has to love something or somebody. He feels that he must go outward. 'If thou canst not love, what art thou?' Are you with me?
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Ninety per cent of life is a nightmare, do you think I am going to get it rounded up to hundred per cent?
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