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6fcec2b
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Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.
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Saul Bellow |
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7c7daa4
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A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
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illusion
intelligence
self-deception
ignorance
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Saul Bellow |
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e6a8892
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One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.
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true-to-life
psychology
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Saul Bellow |
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84cab47
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Live or die, but don't poison everything.
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living
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Saul Bellow |
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625ef98
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Boredom is the conviction that you can't change ... the shriek of unused capacities.
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fulfillment
boredom
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Saul Bellow |
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60319ac
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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.
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Saul Bellow |
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19fe837
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You can spend the entire second half of your life recovering from the mistakes of the first half.
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Saul Bellow |
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9f5ccc9
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Readiness to answer all questions is the infallible sign of stupidity.
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Saul Bellow |
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7039cd0
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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...
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solitude
life
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Saul Bellow |
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52543c4
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If I'm out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.
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jewish
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Saul Bellow |
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8d553fe
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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.
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Saul Bellow |
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d547325
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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.
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Saul Bellow |
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a5c0eb4
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Associate with the noblest people you can find; read the best books; live with the mighty; but learn to be happy alone.
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reading
happiness
life
self-sufficiency
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Saul Bellow |
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a752de3
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I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed. And then? I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed. And what next? I get laid, I take a short holiday, but very soon after I fall upon those same thorns with gratification in pain, or suffering in joy - who knows what the mixture is! What good, what lasting good is there in me? Is there nothing else between birth and death but what I can get out of this perversity - only a favorable balance of disorde..
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Saul Bellow |
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c5e5968
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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.
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Saul Bellow |
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8443b92
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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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Saul Bellow |
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a356d4a
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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.
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Saul Bellow |
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ebd56e3
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Some people, if they didn't make it hard for themselves, might fall asleep.
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Saul Bellow |
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06cb272
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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.
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Saul Bellow |
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da90f74
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No, really, Herr Nietzche, I have great admiration for you. Sympathy. You want to make us able to live with the void. Not lie ourselves into good-naturedness, trust, ordinary middling human considerations, but to question as has never been questioned before, relentlessly, with iron determination, into evil, through evil, past evil, accepting no abject comfort. The most absolute, the most piercing questions. Rejecting mankind as it is, that ..
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Saul Bellow |
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81826de
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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.
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Saul Bellow |
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884a1e6
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For instance? Well, for instance, what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organized power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the late failure of radical hopes. In a society that was no community and devalued the person. Owing to the multiplied power of numbers which made the self negligible. Which spent military billions against f..
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science
machinery
modernism
obscurity
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Saul Bellow |
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2028542
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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.
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Saul Bellow |
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797d846
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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.
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Saul Bellow |
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fb360ec
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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!
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Saul Bellow |
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0e72481
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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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leaders
power
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Saul Bellow |
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9d0cf8a
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She's very pretty but she's honey from the icebox, if you know what I mean. Cold sweets won't spread.
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Saul Bellow |
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62d4231
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But what is the philosophy of this generation? Not God is dead, that point was passed long ago. Perhaps it should be stated Death is God. This generation thinks - and this is its thought of thoughts - that nothing faithful, vulnerable, fragile can be durable or have any true power. Death waits for these things as a cement floor waits for a dropping light bulb. The brittle shell of glass loses its tiny vacuum with a burst, and that is that. ..
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Saul Bellow |
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98afc33
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It seems, after all that there are no nonpeculiar people.
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Saul Bellow |
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8179ee3
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Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything.
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Saul Bellow |
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6b1991b
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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.
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Saul Bellow |
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6112281
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It would not be practical for her to hate herself. Luckily, God sends a substitute, a husband.
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Saul Bellow |
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27949db
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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."
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Saul Bellow |
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abbea64
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She sits and listens with crossed legs under the batik house-wrap she wears, with her heavy three-way-piled hair and cigarette at her mouth and refuses me - for the time being, anyway - the most important things I ask of her. It's really kind of tremendous how it all takes place. You'd never guess how much labor goes into it. Only some time ago it occurred to me how great an amount. She came back from the studio and went to take a bath, a..
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Saul Bellow |
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41d7cba
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Ninety per cent of life is a nightmare, do you think I am going to get it rounded up to hundred per cent?
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Saul Bellow |
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f71114a
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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 ..
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man-s-inhumanity-to-man
inhumanity
evil
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Saul Bellow |
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d3ab065
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Facts always are sensational.
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Saul Bellow |
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72e4c9b
|
If you could have confidence in nature you would not have to fear. It would keep you up. Creative is nature. Rapid. Lavish. Inspirational. It shapes leaves. It rolls the waters of the earth. Man is the chief of this. All creations are his just inheritance. You don't know what you've got within you. A person either creates or he destroys. There is no neutrality.
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nature
nature-of-man
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Saul Bellow |
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3c5df8d
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On Broadway it was still bright afternoon and the gassy air was almost motionless under the leaden spokes of sunlight, and sawdust footprints lay about the doorways of butcher shops and fruit stores. And the great, great crowd, the inexhaustible current of millions of every race and kind pouring out, pressing round, of every race and genius, possessors of every human secret, antique and future, in every face the refinement of one particular..
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Saul Bellow |
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91afdcb
|
Every other man spoke a language entirely his own, which he had figured out by private thinking; he had his own ideas and peculiar ways. If you wanted to talk about a glass of water, you had to start back with God creating the heavens and earth; the apple; Abraham; Moses and Jesus; Rome; the Middle Ages; gunpowder; the Revolution; back to Newton; up to Einstein; then war and Lenin and Hitler. After reviewing this and getting it all straight..
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Saul Bellow |
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1c352fb
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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....
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life
pain-schedule
midlife-crisis
|
Saul Bellow |
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f9be340
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How should I know why! I didn't invent human beings, Iggy.
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Saul Bellow |
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0536b85
|
Strict seriousness was far more dangerous than any joke.
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Saul Bellow |
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4850765
|
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.
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population-growth
pride
|
Saul Bellow |