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Human character is smaller now, people don't have durable passions they've replaced passions with excitement.

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
People
Smaller
Replaced
Passions
Excitement
Passion
Character
Human
Humans
Durable

More quotes by Saul Bellow

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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?
Saul Bellow
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Art is order, made out of the chaos of life.
Saul Bellow
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One must bear in mind the odd angle or slant that the rays of love have to take in order to reach a heart like mine.
Saul Bellow
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It seems, after all that there are no nonpeculiar people.
Saul Bellow
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Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living. But the over-examined life makes you wish you were dead. Given the alternative, I'd rather be living.
Saul Bellow
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People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.
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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The more realistic you are the more you threaten the grounds of your own art.
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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I don't like to write from a flat, cold position. You must like what you're doing very much or like the people -- either like them or hate them. You can't be indifferent.
Saul Bellow
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Americans must be the most sententious people in history. Far too busy to be religious, they have always felt that they sorely needed guidance.
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 never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.
Saul Bellow
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A writer is a reader moved to emulation.
Saul Bellow
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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 great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
Saul Bellow
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... an era of turmoil and ideological confusion, the principal phenomenon of the present age.
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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Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.
Saul Bellow
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My face too blind, my mind too limited, my instincts too narrow. But this intensity, doesn't it mean anything?
Saul Bellow