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Everyone Tries To Create A World He Can Live In, And What He Can't Use He Often Can't See. But The Real World Is Already Created, And If Your Fabrication Doesn't Correspond, Then Even If You Feel Noble And Insist On There Being Something Better Than What People Call Reality, That Better Something Needn't Try To Exceed What, In Its Actuality, Since We Know It So Little, May Be Very Surprising. If A Happy State Of Things, Surprising; If Miserable Or Tragic, No Worse Than What We Invent.

-Saul Bellow

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Everyone Tries To Create

Saul Bellow

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Everyone Tries To Create A World He Can Live In, And What He Can't Use He Often Can't See. But The Real World Is Already Created, And If Your Fabrication Doesn't Correspond, Then Even If You Feel Noble And Insist On There Being Something Better Than What People Call Reality, That Better Something Needn't Try To Exceed What, In Its Actuality, Since We Know It So Little, May Be Very Surprising. If A Happy State Of Things, Surprising; If Miserable Or Tragic, No Worse Than What We Invent.

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The Dream Of Man's Heart ... Is That Life May Complete In Significant Pattern.

The Spirit Knows That Its Growth Is The Real Aim Of Existence.

I Don't Know Exactly How It's Done. I Let It Alone A Good Deal.

Take Our Politicians: They're A Bunch Of Yo-yos. The Presidency Is Now A Cross Between A Popularity Contest And A High School Debate, With An Encyclopedia Of Cliches.

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.

There's A Kind Of Emptiness At The Center Of Life ... Nothing To Form Your Life On, Or By.

It's No Disgrace To Be A Private, You Know. Socrates Was A Plain Foot Soldier, A Hoplite.

Nobody Asks You To Love The Whole World, Only To Be Honest, Ehrlich. Don't Have A Loud Mouth. The More You Love People The More They'll Mix You Up. A Child Loves, A Person Respects. Respect Is Better Than Love.

Ninety Per Cent Of Life Is A Nightmare, Do You Think I Am Going To Get It Rounded Up To Hundred Per Cent?

If I'm Out Of My Mind, It's All Right With Me, Thought Moses Herzog.

You Never Have To Change Anything You Got Up In The Middle Of The Night To Write.

The More Realistic You Are The More You Threaten The Grounds Of Your Own Art.

I Don’t Actually Take Much Stock In The Collapsing Culture Bit. I’m Beginning To See It Instead As The Conduct Of Life Without Input From Your Soul.

Hapiness Can Only Be Found If You Can Free Yourself Of All Other Distractions.

Facts Always Are Sensational.

Brother Raises A Hand Against Brother And Son Against Father (how Terrible!) And The Father Also Against Son. And Moreover It Is A Continuity-matter, For If The Father Did Not Strike The Son, They Would Not Be Alike. It Is Done To Perpetuate Similarity. Oh, Henderson, Man Cannot Keep Still Under The Blows.... A Hit B? B Hit C?--we Have Not Enough Alphabet To Cover The Condition. A Brave Man Will Try To Make The Evil Stop With Him. He Shall Keep The Blow. No Man Shall Get It From Him, And That Is A Sublime Ambition.

"what Do Women Want?" "they Eat Green Salad And Drink Human Blood."

The Writer Cannot Make The Seas Of Distraction Stand Still, But He [or She] Can At Times Come Between The Madly Distracted And The Distractions.

I Would Like To Explain That I Consider Prayer Above All An Act Of Gratitude For Existence.

In The Greatest Confusion There Is Still An Open Channel To The Soul. It May Be Difficult To Find Because By Midlife It Is Overgrown, And Some Of The Wildest Thickets That Surround It Grow Out Of What We Describe As Our Education. But The Channel Is Always There, And It Is Our Business To Keep It Open, To Have Access To The Deepest Part Of Ourselves.

But Privately When Things Got Very Bad I Often Looked Into Books To See Whether I Could Find Some Helpful Words, And One Day I Read, "the Forgiveness Of Sins Is Perpetual And Righteousness First Is Not Required." This Impressed Me So Deeply That I Went Around Saying It To Myself. But Then I Forgot Which Book It Was.

You Can Spend The Entire Second Half Of Your Life Recovering From The Mistakes Of The First Half.

...i Am Much Better Now At Ambiguities.

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.'

Goodness Is Achieved Not In A Vacuum, But In The Company Of Other Men, Attended By Love.

You Have To Fight For Your Life. That's The Chief Condition On Which You Hold It.

There Are Times When The Most Practical Thing Is To Lie Down.

Practical Things

Unexpected Intrusions Of Beauty. This Is What Life Is.

The First Undressing Of Two Lovers Is A Most Special Event.

Everybody Needs His Memories. They Keep The Wolf Of Insignificance From The Door.

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.

Fidelity Is For Phonographs

We Mustn't Forget How Quickly The Visions Of Genius Become The Canned Goods Of Intellectuals.

A Great Deal Of Intelligence Can Be Invested In Ignorance When The Need For Illusion Is Deep.

I Love Solitude, But I Prize It Most When Plenty Of Company Is Available.

When The Striving Ceases, There Is Life Waiting As A Gift.

A Plan Relieves You Of The Torment Of Choice.

And I Said To Myself That Unless You Conceive Death To Be A Violent Guerrilla And Kidnaper Who Snatches Those You Love, And If You Are Not Cowardly And Cannot Submit To Such Terrorism As Civilized People Now Do In Every Department Of Life, You Must Pursue And Inquire And Explore Every Possibility And Seek Everywhere And Try Everything.

Writers Are Greatly Respected. The Intelligent Public Is Wonderfully Patient With Them, Continues To Read Them, And Endures Disappointment After Disappointment, Waiting To Hear From Art What It Does Not Hear From Theology, Philosophy, Social Theory, And What It Cannot Hear From Pure Science. Out Of The Struggle At The Center Has Come 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.

Americans Must Be The Most Sententious People In History. Far Too Busy To Be Religious, They Have Always Felt That They Sorely Needed Guidance.

California Is Like An Artificial Limb The Rest Of The Country Doesn't Really Need. You Can Quote Me On That.

I Seem To Have The Blind Self-acceptance Of The Eccentric Who Can't Conceive That His Eccentricities Are Not Clearly Understood.

But A Man's Character Is His Fate... And In The End There Isn't Any Way To Disguise The Nature Of The Knocks By Acoustical Work On The Door Or Gloving The Knuckles.

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.

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've Never Turned Over A Fig Leaf Yet That Didn't Have A Price Tag On The Other Side.

As For Types Like My Own, Obscurely Motivated By The Conviction That Our Existence Was Worthless If We Didn't Make A Turning Point Of It, We Were Assigned To The Humanities, To Poetry, Philosophy, Painting - The Nursery Games Of Humankind, Which Had To Be Left Behind When The Age Of Science Began. The Humanities Would Be Called Upon To Choose A Wallpaper For The Crypt, As The End Drew Near.

A Man Is Only As Good As What He Loves.

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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.

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.

Erotic Practices Have Become Diversified. Sex Used To Be A Single-crop Farming, Like Cotton Or Wheat; Now People Raise All Kinds Of Things.

I Mean You Have Been Disappointed In Love, But Don't You Know How Many Things There Are To Be Disappointed In Besides Love? You Are Lucky To Be Still Disappointed In Love. Later It May Be Even More Terrible.

Whoever Wants To Reach A Distant Goal Must Take Small Steps.

Each Man Has His Own Batch Of Poems.

He Believed That He Must, That He Could And Would Recover The Good Things, The Happy Things, The Easy Tranquil Things Of Life. He Had Made Mistakes, But He Could Overlook These. He Had Been A Fool, But That Could Be Forgiven. The Time Wasted--must Be Relinquished. What Else Could One Do About It? Things Were Too Complex, But They Might Be Reduced To Simplicity Again. Recovery Was Possible.

The Best Argument Is An Undeniably Good Book.

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I'm Glad I Haven't Lived In Vain.

It's Goodbye To Reality When Love Sets In.

It Is A Joy To Be Choked With Thought.

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There Is Only One Way To Defeat The Enemy, And That Is To Write As Well As One Can. The Best Argument Is An Undeniably Good Book.

I Think That Art Has Something To Do With An Arrest Of Attention In The Midst Of Distraction.

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I Have Begun In Old Age To Understand...that We Seldom If Ever Realize How Generous We Are To Ourselves, And Just How Stingy With Others.

Anxiety Destroys Scale, And Suffering Makes Us Lose Perspective.

The Two Real Problems In Life Are Boredom And Death.

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Unless You're Completely Exploded, There's Always Something To Be Grateful For.

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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. It Tells Us That For Every Human Being There Is A Diversity Of Existences, That The Single Existence Is Itself An Illusion In Part, That These Many Existences Signify Something, Tend To Something, Fulfill Something; It Promises Us Meaning, Harmony, And Even Justice.

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With A Novelist, Like A Surgeon, You Have To Get A Feeling That You've Fallen Into Good Hands - Someone From Whom You Can Accept The Anesthetic With Confidence.

All Human Accomplishment Has This Same Origin, Identically. Imagination Is A Force Of Nature. Is This Not Enough To Make A Person Full Of Ecstasy? Imagination, Imagination, Imagination! It Converts To Actual. It Sustains, It Alters, It Redeems!

I Am An American, Chicago Born – Chicago, That Somber City – And Go At Things As I Have Taught Myself, Free-style, And Will Make The Record In My Own Way: First To Knock, First Admitted; Sometimes An Innocent Knock, Sometimes A Not So Innocent. But A Man's Character Is His Fate, Says Heraclitus, And In The End There Isn't Any Way To Disguise The Nature Of The Knocks By Acoustical Work On The Door Or Gloving The Knuckles.

Humankind Struggles With Collective Powers For Its Freedom, The Individual Struggles With Dehumanization For The Possession Of His Soul.

I Feel That Art Has Something To Do With The Achievement Of Stillness In The Midst Of Chaos. A Stillness Which Characterizes Prayer, Too, And The Eye Of The Storm. I Think That Art Has Something To Do With An Arrest Of Attention In The Midst Of Distraction.

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If I Had A Child Of School Age, I Would Send Him To One Of The Waldorf Schools.

Death Is The Dark Backing A Mirror Needs If We Are To See Anything

In Expressing Love We Belong Among The Undeveloped Countries.

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Art Attempts To Find In The Universe, In Matter As Well As In The Facts Of Life, What Is Fundamental, Enduring, Essential.

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.

Unfortunately For The Betterment Of Mankind It Is Not Always The Fair-minded Who Are In The Right.

O Lord! He Concluded, Forgive All These Trespasses. Lead Me Not Into Penn Station.

From Euclid To Newton There Were Straight Lines. The Modern Age Analyzes The Wavers.

I See That I've Become A Really Bad Correspondent. It's Not That I Don't Think Of You. You Come Into My Thoughts Often. But When You Do It Appears To Me That I Owe You A Particularly Grand Letter. And So You End In The "warehouse Of Good Intentions": "can't Do It Now." "then Put It On Hold." This Is One's Strategy For Coping With Old Age, And With Death--because One Can't Die With So Many Obligations In Storage. Our Clever Species, So Fertile And Resourceful In Denying Its Weaknesses.

The Body, She Says, Is Subject To The Force Of Gravity. But The Soul Is Ruled By Levity, Pure.

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.

Forces Of Nature

I Am Moneys Medium. It Passes Through Me- Taxes, Insurance, Mortgage, Child Support, Rent, Legal Fees. All This Dignified Blundering Costs Plenty.

There Was A Disturbance In My Heart, A Voice That Spoke There And Said, I Want, I Want, I Want! It Happened Every Afternoon, And When I Tried To Suppress It It Got Even Stronger.

Conquered People Tend To Be Witty.

How Could I Be Anything But A Dissenter? Who Wants The Opinion Of A Group?

I Must Play The Instrument I've Got.

Open Discussion Of Many Major Public Questions Has For Some Time Now Been Taboo. We Can't Open Our Mouths Without Being Denounced As Racists, Misogynists, Supremacists, Imperialists Or Fascists. As For The Media, They Stand Ready To Trash Anyone So Designated.

The Hour That Burst The Spirit's Sleep.

You Have, Like The External World, Your Own Phenomena Inside.

Our Society, Like Decadent Rome, Has Turned Into An Amusement Society, With Writers Chief Among The Court Jesters

The Main Reason For Rewriting Is Not To Achieve A Smooth Surface, But To Discover The Inner Truth Of Your Characters.

Well, Everybody Has A History.

At Moments I Dislike Having A Face, A Nose, Lips, Because He Has Them.

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.

Myself Is Thus And So, And Will Continue Thus And So. And Why Fight It? My Balance Comes From Instability.

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.

I Am More Stupid About Some Things Than Others; Not Equally Stupid In All Directions; I Am Not A Well-rounded Person.

A Person Either Creates Or Destroys. There Is No Neutrality.

...is The Carbon Molecule Lined With Thought?

Fun Comes Hard - Like, Alas, Its Prarens, Pleasure And Happiness, Whom We Have To Pursue.

...there Is No Old Age Of The Soul.

People Don't Realize How Much They Are In The Grip Of Ideas. We Live Among Ideas Much More Than We Live In Nature.

The Secret Motive Of The Absent-minded Is To Be Innocent While Guilty. Absent-mindedness Is Spurious Innocence.

Death Deserves Dignity.

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.

It's Hard For Writers To Get On With Their Work If They Are Convinced That They Owe A Concrete Debt To Experience And Cannot Allow Themselves The Privilege Of Ranging Freely Through Social Classes And Professional Specialties. A Certain Pride In Their Own Experience, Perhaps A Sense Of The Property Rights Of Others In Their Experience, Holds Them Back.

What Homo Sapien Imagines, He May Slowly Convert Himself To.

Language Is A Spiritual Mansion In Which You Live And Nobody Has The Right To Evict You.

Towards The End Of Your Life You Have Something Like A Pain Schedule To Fill Out - A Long Schedule Like A Federal Document, Only It's Your Pain Schedule. Endless Categories. First, Physical Causes - Like Arthritis, Gallstones, Menstrual Cramps. New Category, Injured Vanity, Betrayal, Swindle, Injustice. But The Hardest Items Of All Have To Do With Love. The Question Then Is: So Why Does Everybody Persist? If Love Cuts Them Up So Much.

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.

She's Very Pretty But She's Honey From The Icebox, If You Know What I Mean. Cold Sweets Won't Spread.

But She's A Nut, And Nuts Win.

Psychoanalysis Pretends To Investigate The Unconscious. The Unconscious By Definition Is What You Are Not Conscious Of. But The Analysts Already Know What's In It - They Should, Because They Put It All In Beforehand.

Alternatives, And Particularly Desirable Alternatives, Grow Only On Imaginary Trees.

A Good Novel Is Worth More Then The Best Scientific Study.

How Should I Know Why! I Didn't Invent Human Beings, Iggy.

Everyone Tries To Create A World He Can Live In, And What He Can't Use He Often Can't See. But The Real World Is Already Created, And If Your Fabrication Doesn't Correspond, Then Even If You Feel Noble And Insist On There Being Something Better Than What People Call Reality, That Better Something Needn't Try To Exceed What, In Its Actuality, Since We Know It So Little, May Be Very Surprising. If A Happy State Of Things, Surprising; If Miserable Or Tragic, No Worse Than What We Invent.

...chaos Doesn't Run The Whole Show.

It Seems Hard For The American People To Believe That Anything Could Be More Exciting Than The Times Themselves. What We Read Daily And View On The Tv Has Thrust Imagined Forms Into The Shadow. We Are Staggeringly Rich In Facts, In Things, And Perhaps, Like The Nouveau Riche Of Other Ages, We Want Our Wealth Faithfully Reproduced By The Artist.

I’ve Had All The Monstrosity I Want.

Because I Have Become Such A Solitary, And Not In The Aristotelian Sense: Not A Beast, Not A God. Rather, A Loner Troubled By Longings, Incapable Of Finding A Suitable Language And Despairing At The Impossibility Of Composing Messages In A Playable Key--as If I No Longer Understood The Codes Used By The Estimable People Who Wanted To Hear From Me And Would Have So Much To Reply If Only The Impediments Were Taken Away.

Can We Find Nothing Good To Say About Tv? Well, Yes, It Brings Scattered Solitaries Into A Sort Of Communion. Tv Allows Your Isolated American To Think That He Participates In The Life Of The Entire Country. It Does Not Actually Place Him In A Community, But His Heart Is Warmed With The Suggestion (on The Whole False) That There Is A Community Somewhere In The Vicinity And That His Atomized Consciousness Will Be Drawn Back Toward The Whole.

One Must Bear In Mind The Odd Angle Or Slant That The Rays Of Love Have To Take In Order To Reach A Heart Like Mine.

In Every Community There Is A Class Of People Profoundly Dangerous To The Rest. I Don't Mean The Criminals. For Them We Have Punitive Sanctions. I Mean The Leaders. Invariably The Most Dangerous People Seek The Power. While In The Parlors Of Indignation The Right-thinking Citizen Brings His Heart To A Boil. (p. 51)

To Tell The Truth I Never Had It So Good. But I Lacked The Strength Of Character To Bear Such Joy.

Do We Always, Always To The Point Of Misery, Do A Thing?

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.

A Writer Is A Reader Moved To Emulation.

I Am A Phoenix Who Runs After Arsonists.

... A Fellow Can't Predict What He Will Pick Up In The Form Of Influence.

In Los Angeles All The Loose Objects In The Country Were Collected, As If America Had Been Tilted And Everything That Wasn't Tightly Screwed Down Had Slid Into Southern California.

With One Long Breath, Caught And Held In His Chest, He Fought His Sadness Over His Solitary Life. Don't Cry, You Idiot! Live Or Die, But Don't Poison Everything.

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.

Boredom Is The Conviction That You Can't Change ... The Shriek Of Unused Capacities.

Bringing People Into The Here-and-now. The Real Universe. That's The Present Moment. The Past Is No Good To Us. The Future Is Full Of Anxiety. Only The Present Is Real--the Here-and-now. Seize The Day.

In An Age Of Enormities, The Emotions Are Naturally Weakened. We Are Continually Called Upon To Have Feelings - About Genocide, For Instance, Or About Famine Or The Blowing Up Of Passenger Planes - And We Are All Aware That We Are Incapable Of Reacting Appropriately. A Guilty Consciousness Of Emotional Inadequacy Or Impotence Makes People Doubt Their Own Human Weight.

One Thought-murder A Day Keeps The Psychiatrist Away.

I Feel That Art Has Something To Do With The Achievement Of Stillness In The Midst Of Chaos.

Readiness To Answer All Questions Is The Infallible Sign Of Stupidity.

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.

And What About All The Good I Have In My Heart - Does It Mean Anything?

Here We Write Well When We Expose Frauds And Hypocrites. We Are Great At Counting Warts And Blemishes And Weighting Feet Of Clay. In Expressing Love, We Belong Among The Underdeveloped Countries.

If Women Are Expected To Do The Same Work As Men, We Must Teach Them The Same Things.

It Seems, After All That There Are No Nonpeculiar People.

(socrates) Said There Were Only Two Possibilities. Either The Soul Is Immortal Or, After Death, Things Would Be Again As Blank As They Were Before We Were Born.

You're All Alone When You're A Writer. Sometimes You Just Feel You Need A Humanity Bath. Even A Ride On The Subway Will Do That. But It's Much More Interesting To Talk About Books. After All, That's What Life Used To Be For Writers: They Talk Books, Politics, History, America. Nothing Has Replaced That.

The Best And Purest Human Beings, From The Beginning Of Time, Have Understood That Life Is Sacred.

The Only Truly Intersting Side Of The Matter Was The Intimate Design Of The Injury, The Fact That It Was So Penetrating, Custom-made Exactly To Your Measure. It's Fascinating That Hatred Should Be So Personal As To Be Almost Loving. The Knife And The Wound Aching For Each Other.

She Was What We Used To Call A Suicide Blonde - Dyed By Her Own Hand.

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.

Love Is The Most Potent Cosmetic.

A Man Must Have Limits And Cannot Give In To The Wild Desires To Be Everything And Everyone And Everything To Everyone.

It Would Not Be Practical For Her To Hate Herself. Luckily, God Sends A Substitute, A Husband.

I Pretended Not To Understand. One Of Life's Hardest Jobs, To Make A Quick Understanding Slow. I Think I Succeeded, Thought Herzog.

The Late Philosopher Morris R. Cohen Of Ccny Was Asked By A Student In The Metaphysics Course, Professor Cohen, How Do I Know That I Exist? The Keen Old Prof Replied, And Who Is Asking?

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.

De Tocqueville Considered The Impulse Toward Well-being As One Of The Strongest Impulses Of A Democratic Society. He Can't Be Blamed For Underestimating The Destructive Powers Generated By This Same Impulse.

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.

There Is Simply Too Much To Think About.

I Labor, I Spend, I Strive, I Design, I Love, I Cling, I Uphold, I Give Way, I Envy, I Long, I Scorn, I Die, I Hide, I Want. Faster, Much Faster Than Any Man Could Make The Tally.

The Fact That There Are So Many Weak, Poor And Boring Stories And Novels Written And Published In America Has Been Ascribed By Our Rebels To The Horrible Squareness Of Our Institutions, The Idiocy Of Power, The Debasement Of Sexual Instincts, And The Failure Of Writers To Be Alienated Enough. The Poems And Novels Of These Same Rebellious Spirits, And Their Theoretical Statements, Are Grimy And Gritty And Very Boring Too, Besides Being Nonsensical, And It Is Evident By Now That Polymorphous Sexuality And Vehement Declarations Of Alienation Are Not Going To Produce Great Works Of Art Either.

Art Is Order, Made Out Of The Chaos Of Life.

But There Are Things You Can't Consult Anybody About.

Human Character Is Smaller Now, People Don't Have Durable Passions; They've Replaced Passions With Excitement.

And I'm Convinced That Knowing The Names Of Things Braces People Up.

The Physical Body Is An Agent Of The Spirit And Its Mirror. It Is An Engine And A Reflection Of The Spirit. It Is The Spirit's Ingenious Memorandum To Itself And The Spirit Sees Itself In My Body, Just As I See My Own Face In A Looking Glass. My Nerves Reflect This. The Earth Is Literally A Mirror Of Thoughts. Objects Themselves Are Embodied Thoughts. Death Is The Dark Backing That A Mirror Needs If We Are To See Anything.

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.

A Fool Can Throw A Stone In A Pond That 100 Wise Men Can Not Get Out.

Let The Enemies Of Life Step Down.

It Is Sometimes Necessary To Repeat What All Know. All Mapmakers Should Place The Mississippi In The Same Location And Avoid Originality.

Is Our Species Crazy? Plenty Of Evidence.

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.

I Am An American – Chicago Born.

... An Era Of Turmoil And Ideological Confusion, The Principal Phenomenon Of The Present Age.

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.

...america Didn't Have To Fight Scarcity And We All Felt Guilty Before People Who Still Had To Struggle For Bread And Freedom In The Old Way ... We Weren't Starving, We Weren't Bugged By The Police, Locked Up In Madhouses For Our Ideas, Arrested, Deported, Slave Laborers Sent To Die In Concentration Camps. We Were Spared The Holocausts And Nights Of Terror. With Our Advantages We Should Be Formulating The New Basic Questions For Mankind. But Instead We Sleep. Just Sleep And Sleep, And Eat And Play And Fuss And Sleep Again.

A Man May Say, "from Now On I'm Going To Speak The Truth." But The Truth Hears Him And Runs Away And Hides Before He's Even Done Speaking.

Guys Like You Make Life Easy For Some Women.

There Are Evils That Have The Ability To Survive Identification And Go On For Ever... Money, For Instance, Or War.

All A Writer Has To Do To Get A Woman Is To Say He's A Writer. It's An Aphrodisiac.

Death Is The Black Backing On The Mirror That Allows Us To See Anything At All.

An Exchange Occurs Between Man And Woman. Love And Thought Complete Each Other In The Human Pair, And Something Like An Exchange Of Souls Takes Place, According To The Divine Plan.

For The First Time In History, The Human Species As A Whole Has Gone Into Politics. Everyone Is In The Act, And There Is No Telling What May Come Of It.

No Realistic, Sane Person Goes Around Chicago Without Protection.

Certain Blood Will Be Given For Half Certain Reasons, As In All Wars.

A Writer Is In The Broadest Sense A Spokesman Of His Community. Through Him That Community Comes To Know Its Heart. Without Such Knowledge, How Long Can It Survive?

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