Quote

It is sometimes necessary to repeat what all know. All mapmakers should place the Mississippi in the same location and avoid originality.

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
Place
Sometimes
Mississippi
Originality
Location
Repeat
Repeats
Avoid
Necessary

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If I'm out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.
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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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We are funny creatures. We don't see the stars as they are, so why do we love them? They are not small gold objects, but endless fire.
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If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.
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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.
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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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Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.
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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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It's usually the selfish people who are loved the most. They do what you deny yourself, and you love them for it. You give them your heart.
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How should I know why! I didn't invent human beings, Iggy.
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Language is a spiritual mansion in which you live and nobody has the right to evict you.
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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.
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Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.
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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?
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I've discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, 'To hell with you.'
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When I didn't argue he was satisfied he had persuaded me, and was not the first to make that mistake.
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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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I seem to have the blind self-acceptance of the eccentric who can't conceive that his eccentricities are not clearly understood.
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Death deserves dignity.
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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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