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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
Sometimes
Mississippi
Originality
Location
Repeat
Repeats
Avoid
Necessary
Place

More quotes by Saul Bellow

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Only self-hatred could lead him to ruin himself because his heart was broken.
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
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There's a kind of emptiness at the center of life ... nothing to form your life on, or by.
Saul Bellow
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I want to tell you, don't marry suffering. Some people do. They get married to it, and sleep and eat together, just as husband and wife. If they go with joy they think it's adultery.
Saul Bellow
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I am moneys medium. It passes through me- taxes, insurance, mortgage, child support, rent, legal fees. All this dignified blundering costs plenty.
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
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A writer is a reader moved to emulation.
Saul Bellow
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People don't realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature.
Saul Bellow
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I blame myself for not often enough seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary. Somewhere in his journals, Dostoyevky remarks that a writer can begin anywhere, at the most commonplace thing, scratch around in it long enough, pry and dig away long enough, and lo!, soon he will hit upon the marvelous.
Saul Bellow
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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.
Saul Bellow
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At moments I dislike having a face, a nose, lips, because he has them.
Saul Bellow
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Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death.
Saul Bellow
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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.
Saul Bellow
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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.
Saul Bellow
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Love is the most potent cosmetic.
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.
Saul Bellow
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All human accomplishment has the same origin, identically. Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination.
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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We are always looking for the book it is necessary to read next.
Saul Bellow
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In politics continental Europe was infantile - horrifying. What America lacked, for all its political stability, was the capacity to enjoy intellectual pleasures as though they were sensual pleasures. This is what Europe offered, or was said to offer.
Saul Bellow