Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellowwas a Canadian-American writer. For his literary work, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times and he received the National Book Foundation's lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1990...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth10 June 1915
CityLachine, Canada
CountryUnited States of America
Great pressure is brought to bear to make us undervalue ourselves. On the other hand, civilization teaches that each of us is an inestimable prize. There are, then, these two preparations: one for life and the other for death. Therefore we value and are ashamed to value ourselves.
The ocean was waiting with grand and bitter provocations, as if it invited you to think how deep it was, how much colder than your blood or saltier, or to outguess it, to tell which were its feints or passes and which its real intentions, meaning business.
Only self-hatred could lead him to ruin himself because his heart was "broken.
Is love supposed to ruin you? It seems to me you shouldn't destroy yourself out of life for purposes of love--or what good is it?
It would not be practical for her to hate herself. Luckily, God sends a substitute, a husband.
Unfortunately for the betterment of mankind it is not always the fair-minded who are in the right.
You have to fight for your life. That's the chief condition on which you hold it.
For God's sake,' the dog is saying, 'open the universe a little more!
Art -- the fresh feeling, new harmony, the transforming magic which by means of myth brings back the scattered distracted soul from its modern chaos -- art, not politics, is the remedy.
Ninety per cent of life is a nightmare, do you think I am going to get it rounded up to hundred per cent?
A human soul devoid of longing was a soul deformed, deprived of its highest good, sick unto death.
The challenge of modern freedom, or the combination of isolation and freedom which confronts you, is to make yourself up. The danger is that you may emerge from the process as a not-entirely-human creature. (Referenced in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People by Toby Young)
I am a true adorer of life, and if I can't reach as high as the face of it, I plant my kiss somewhere lower down. Those who understand will require no further explanation.
One way or another the no doubt mad idea entered my mind that my own actions had historic importance and this fantasy (?) made it appear that people who harmed me were interfering with an important experiment.