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
Location
Repeat
Repeats
Avoid
Necessary
Place
Sometimes
Mississippi
Originality

More quotes by Saul Bellow

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What do women want? They eat green salad and drink human blood.
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In an age of madness, to expect to be untouched by madness is a form of madness. But the pursuit of sanity can be a form of madness, too
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I’ve had all the monstrosity I want.
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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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If I'm out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.
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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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My face too blind, my mind too limited, my instincts too narrow. But this intensity, doesn't it mean anything?
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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.
Saul Bellow
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The sand swallows burst out of their scupper holes in the bluffs and out over the transparent drown of the water, back again to the white, to the brown, to the black, from moving to stock-still sand waves and water-worked woods and roots that hugged and twisted in the sun.
Saul Bellow
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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.
Saul Bellow
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... a fellow can't predict what he will pick up in the form of influence.
Saul Bellow
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Death is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything
Saul Bellow
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Conquered people tend to be witty.
Saul Bellow
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It's goodbye to reality when love sets in.
Saul Bellow
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Retirement is an illusion. Not a reward but a mantrap. The bankrupt underside of success. A shortcut to death. Golf courses are too much like cemeteries.
Saul Bellow
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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.
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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Well, everybody has a history.
Saul Bellow
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I'm afraid there's nothing we can do about the journalists we can only hope that they will die off as the deerflies do towards the end of August.
Saul Bellow
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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.
Saul Bellow