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For the first time in history, the human species as a whole has gone into politics. Everyone is in the act, and there is no telling what may come of it.

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
Whole
Everyone
Time
History
May
Firsts
Human
Telling
Humans
Species
Come
Politics
First
Gone

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There is an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for.
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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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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.
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Losing a parent is something like driving through a plate-glass window. You didn't know it was there until it shattered, and then for years to come you're picking up the pieces -- down to the last glassy splinter.
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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.
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With a novelist, like a surgeon, you have to get a feeling that you've fallen into good hands - someone from whom you can accept the anesthetic with confidence.
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The two real problems in life are boredom and death.
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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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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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It's not up to me ... to make the world consistent.
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There are times when the most practical thing is to lie down.
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We mustn't forget how quickly the visions of genius become the canned goods of intellectuals.
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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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At moments I dislike having a face, a nose, lips, because he has them.
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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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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.
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O Lord! he concluded, forgive all these trespasses. Lead me not into Penn Station.
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A writer is a reader moved to emulation.
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The body, she says, is subject to the force of gravity. But the soul is ruled by levity, pure.
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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.
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