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Alternatives, and particularly desirable alternatives, grow only on imaginary trees.

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
Tree
Decision
Grows
Desirable
Imaginary
Alternatives
Trees
Particularly
Grow

More quotes by Saul Bellow

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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.
Saul Bellow
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It's no disgrace to be a private, you know. Socrates was a plain foot soldier, a hoplite.
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Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.
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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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The more realistic you are the more you threaten the grounds of your own art.
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It wasn't that he was specially ungenerous but that he put things off to give his generosity a longer and more significant route.
Saul Bellow
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A man must have limits and cannot give in to the wild desires to be everything and everyone and everything to everyone.
Saul Bellow
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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?
Saul Bellow
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It's goodbye to reality when love sets in.
Saul Bellow
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A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
Saul Bellow
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At moments I dislike having a face, a nose, lips, because he has them.
Saul Bellow
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You can spend the entire second half of your life recovering from the mistakes of the first half.
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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Also, he was smoking a cigar, and when a man is smoking a cigar, wearing a hat, he has an advantage it is harder to find out how he feels.
Saul Bellow
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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.
Saul Bellow
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The stillness in art characterizes prayer, and the eye of the storm.
Saul Bellow
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If I had a child of school age, I would send him to one of the Waldorf Schools.
Saul Bellow
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How should I know why! I didn't invent human beings, Iggy.
Saul Bellow
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And I said to myself that unless you conceive Death to be a violent guerrilla and kidnaper who snatches those you love, and if you are not cowardly and cannot submit to such terrorism as civilized people now do in every department of life, you must pursue and inquire and explore every possibility and seek everywhere and try everything.
Saul Bellow
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Is our species crazy? Plenty of evidence.
Saul Bellow