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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.

-Saul Bellow

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He Believed That He

Saul Bellow

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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.

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

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

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The Only Real Distinction At This Dangerous Moment In Human History And Cosmic Development Has Nothing To Do With Medals And Ribbons. Not To Fall Asleep Is Distinguished. Everything Else Is Mere Popcorn.

My Face Too Blind, My Mind Too Limited, My Instincts Too Narrow. But This Intensity, Doesn't It Mean Anything?

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

I’ve Had All The Monstrosity I Want.

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

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.

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

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

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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A Novel Is Balanced Between A Few True Impressions And The Multitude Of False Ones That Make Up Most Of What We Call Life.

Facts Always Are Sensational.

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

Guys Like You Make Life Easy For Some Women.

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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.

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

It Is A Joy To Be Choked With Thought.

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!

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

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.

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

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.

We Are Always Looking For The Book It Is Necessary To Read Next.

Everybody Knows There Is No Fineness Or Accuracy Of Suppression; If You Hold Down One Thing, You Hold Down The Adjoining.

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

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

A Man Is Only As Good As What He Loves.

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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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

When I Didn't Argue He Was Satisfied He Had Persuaded Me, And Was Not The First To Make That Mistake.

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

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

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I Have, Perhaps, A Slave-like Constitution Which Is Too Easily Restrained By Bonds; It Then Becomes Rebellious And Bursts Out In A Comic Revolution.

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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?

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

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A Human Soul Devoid Of Longing Was A Soul Deformed, Deprived Of Its Highest Good, Sick Unto Death.

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

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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.'

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

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Some People, If They Didn't Make It Hard For Themselves, Might Fall Asleep.

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...is The Carbon Molecule Lined With Thought?

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

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

Only Self-hatred Could Lead Him To Ruin Himself Because His Heart Was "broken.

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

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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.

The Two Real Problems In Life Are Boredom And Death.

A Writer Is A Reader Moved To Emulation.

One Thought-murder A Day Keeps The Psychiatrist Away.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

It's Goodbye To Reality When Love Sets In.

Any Artist Should Be Grateful For A Naive Grace Which Puts Him Beyond The Need To Reason Elaborately.

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

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.

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.

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

Strict Seriousness Was Far More Dangerous Than Any Joke.

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

A Man Should Be Able To Hear, And To Bear, The Worst That Could Be Said Of Him.

I Am Something Of A Crank About Sleep, For If I Get Seven And A Quarter Hours Instead Of Eight I Feel Afflicted And Drag Myself Around, Although There's Nothing Really Wrong With Me. It's Just Another Idea. That's How It Is With My Ideas; They Seem To Get Strong While I Weaken.

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.

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.

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

Let The Enemies Of Life Step Down.

I Am Deeply Moved When I Write. I Get Turned On By It. I've Never Used Any Drugs For Stimulation. I Don't Use Words Loosely. When I'm Working And The Right Word Comes, There Is An Answering Resonance Within Me. There Is Also A Hardness Of Intention That Goes With It. There Is No Idleness In It.

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

We Take Foreigners To Be Incomplete Americans -- Convinced That We Must Help And Hasten Their Evolution.

Anxiety Destroys Scale, And Suffering Makes Us Lose Perspective.

Live Or Die But Don't Poison Everything.

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

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.

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.

The Terms Which, In His Inmost Heart, Each Man Knows. As I Know Mine. As All Know. For That Is The Truth Of It — That We All Know, God, That We Know, That We Know, We Know, We Know.

...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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Unexpected Intrusions Of Beauty. This Is What Life Is.

In Expressing Love We Belong Among The Undeveloped Countries.

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We Are All Such Accidents. We Do Not Make Up History And Culture. We Simply Appear, Not By Our Own Choice. We Make What We Can Of Our Condition With The Means Available. We Must Accept The Mixture As We Find It - The Impurity Of It, The Tragedy Of It, The Hope Of It.

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.

Excuse Me ... But I Reject Your Definitions Of Me.

... Unless You Made Your Life A Turning Point, There Was No Reason For Existing.

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.

I Must Play The Instrument I've Got.

Is Our Species Crazy? Plenty Of Evidence.

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.

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

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

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.

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

It Wasn't That He Was Specially Ungenerous But That He Put Things Off To Give His Generosity A Longer And More Significant Route.

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.

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

The Best Argument Is An Undeniably Good Book.

The Stillness In Art Characterizes Prayer, And The Eye Of The Storm.

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.

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

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.

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

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'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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Fidelity Is For Phonographs

In The History Of The World Many Souls Have Been, Are, And Will Be, And With A Little Reflection This Is Marvelous And Not Depressing. Many Jerks Are Made Gloomy About It, For They Think Quantity Buries Them Alive. That's Just Crazy. Numbers Are Very Dangerous, But The Main Thing About Them Is That They Humble Your Pride. And That's Good.

It's Not Up To Me ... To Make The World Consistent.

Associate With The Noblest People You Can Find; Read The Best Books; Live With The Mighty; But Learn To Be Happy Alone.

There Is Much To Be Said For Exotic Marriages. If Your Husband Is A Bore, It Takes Years Longer To Discover.

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.

I Am A Phoenix Who Runs After Arsonists.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Each Man Has His Own Batch Of Poems.

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

Well, Everybody Has A History.

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.

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)

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