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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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Saul Bellow
Age: 89 †
Born: 1915
Born: June 10
Died: 2005
Died: April 5
Author
Essayist
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Solomon Bellows
Wells
Traps
Well
Cuts
Think
Isolation
Thinking
Helped
Life
Cutting
Bordered
Sides
Booby
Freedom
Banquet
Best
Banquets

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A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
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Each man has his own batch of poems.
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Fidelity is for phonographs
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I am deeply moved when I write. I get turned on by it. I've never used any drugs for stimulation. I don't use words loosely. When I'm working and the right word comes, there is an answering resonance within me. There is also a hardness of intention that goes with it. There is no idleness in it.
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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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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.
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Associate with the noblest people you can find read the best books live with the mighty but learn to be happy alone.
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It is wrong to turn a man (a subject) into a thing (an object). By means of spiritual dialogue, the I-It relationship becomes an I-Thou relationship. God comes and goes in man's soul. And men come and go in each other's souls. Sometimes they come and go in each other's beds, too.
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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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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.
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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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I have, perhaps, a slave-like constitution which is too easily restrained by bonds it then becomes rebellious and bursts out in a comic revolution.
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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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It wasn't that he was specially ungenerous but that he put things off to give his generosity a longer and more significant route.
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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.
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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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A human soul devoid of longing was a soul deformed, deprived of its highest good, sick unto death.
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To tell the truth I never had it so good. But I lacked the strength of character to bear such joy.
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Art is order, made out of the chaos of life.
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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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