Quote

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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Saul Bellow
Age: 89 †
Born: 1915
Born: June 10
Died: 2005
Died: April 5
Author
Essayist
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Solomon Bellows
Americans
Needed
Religious
History
Felt
Must
Sorely
Always
Guidance
People
Busy

More quotes by Saul Bellow

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The life of every citizen is becoming a business. This, it seems to me, is one of the worst interpretations of the meaning of human life history has ever seen. Man's life is not a business.
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She's very pretty but she's honey from the icebox, if you know what I mean. Cold sweets won't spread.
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You can spend the entire second half of your life recovering from the mistakes of the first half.
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From Euclid to Newton there were straight lines. The modern age analyzes the wavers.
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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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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.
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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There is simply too much to think about.
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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Fidelity is for phonographs
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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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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Ninety per cent of life is a nightmare, do you think I am going to get it rounded up to hundred per cent?
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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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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The more realistic you are the more you threaten the grounds of your own art.
Saul Bellow
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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.
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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Excuse me ... but I reject your definitions of me.
Saul Bellow
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The soul has to find and hold its ground against hostile forces, sometimes embodied in ideas which frequently deny its very existence, and which indeed often seem to be trying to annul it altogether.
Saul Bellow