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a8ea28a
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It is my childish mind that thinks people are ready to give it just because you need it.
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Saul Bellow |
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b941cf4
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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.
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Saul Bellow |
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56b31d3
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Everybody pays the heart lip service, of course, but everybody is more familiar with the absence of love than with its presence and gets so used to the feeling of emptiness that it becomes "normal." You don't miss the foundation of feeling until you begin to look for your self and can't find a support in the affects for a self."
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Saul Bellow |
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394ff32
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Therefore we didn't talk of genuine things.
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Saul Bellow |
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c6d5d9c
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Not that life should end is so terrible in itself, but that it should end with so many disappointments in the essential.
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Saul Bellow |
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ba4ef70
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But maybe time was invented so that misery might have an end. So that it shouldn't last forever? There may be something in this. And bliss, just the opposite, is eternal? There is no time in bliss. All the clocks were thrown out of heaven.
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Saul Bellow |
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1f4d6b5
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What art thou?' Nothing. That's the answer. Nothing. In the heart of hearts- Nothing! So of course you can't stand that and want to be Something, and you try. But instead of being this Something, the man puts it over on everybody instead.
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Saul Bellow |
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2a5eb86
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Well, don't build me up so, and you won't have to tear me down.
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Saul Bellow |
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38302c2
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I wish my dead days would quit bothering me and leave me alone. The bad stuff keeps coming back, and it's the worst rhythm there is. The repetition of a man's bad self, that's the worst suffering that's ever been known.
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Saul Bellow |
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8dc676d
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Ravelstein mentioned that Keynes had married a Russian ballerina. He also explained to me that Uranus had fathered Aphrodite but that she had had no mother. She was conceived by the sea foam. He would say such things not because he thought I was ignorant of them but because he judged that I needed at a given moment to have my thoughts directed toward them.
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Saul Bellow |
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535413a
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Yes, these business people have great energy. There's a question as to what's burned to produce it and what things we can and can't burn.
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Saul Bellow |
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ad8dece
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The more south we were, the more deep a sky it seemed, till, in the Valley of Mexico, I thought it held back an element too strong for life, and that the flamy brilliance of blue stood off this menace and sometimes, like a sheath or silk membrane, shoed the weight it held in sags. So when later he would fly high over the old craters on the plain, coaly bubbles of the underworld, dangerous red everywhere from the sun, and then coats of snow ..
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Saul Bellow |
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cba6036
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To rip off a piece of lover's temper was a pleasure in her deepest vein of enjoyment.
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Saul Bellow |
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3b6b2b0
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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.
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Saul Bellow |
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669c578
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We never learn anything, never in the world, and in spite of all the history books written. They're just the way we plead or ague with ourselves about it, but it's only light from the outside that we're supposed to take inside. If we can. There's a regular warehouse of fine suggestions and if we're not better it isn't because there aren't plenty of marvelous and true ideas to draw on, but because our vanity weighs more than all of them put ..
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Saul Bellow |
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9785fe8
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Some big insect flew in and began walking on the table. I don't know what insect it was, but it was brown, shining, and rich in structures. In the city the big universal chain of insects gets thin, but where there's a leaf or two it'll be represented.
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insects
structures
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Saul Bellow |
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1d18db9
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Many common lies and hypocrisies are like that, just out of the harmony of the moment.
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hypocrisy
lying
rationalization
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Saul Bellow |
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8e42fe4
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Everyone was like the faces on a playing card, upside down either way.
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Saul Bellow |
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87e10ed
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How we all love extreme cases and apocalypses, fires, drownings, stranglings, and the rest of it. The bigger our mild, basically ethical, safe middle classes grow the more radical excitement is in demand. Mild or moderate truthfulness or accuracy seems to have no pull at all.
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extreme-cases
radical-excitement
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Saul Bellow |
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5413403
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Still, what can thoughtful people and humanists do but struggle toward suitable words? Take me, for instance. I've been writing letters helter-skelter in all directions. More words. I go after reality with language. Perhaps I'd like to change it all into language, to force Madeline and Gersbach to have a Conscience. There's a word for you. I must be trying to keep tight the tensions without which human beings can no longer be called human. ..
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Saul Bellow |
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446b93e
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You never know what forms self-respect will take, especially with people whose rules of life are few.
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Saul Bellow |
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6d8de62
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It was probably no accident that it was the cripple Hephaestus who made ingenious machines; a normal man didn't have to hoist or jack himself over hindrances by means of cranks, chains and metal parts. Then it was in the line of human advance that Einhorn could do so much.
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innovation
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Saul Bellow |
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be1fe69
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my feelings were big, sad, comfortless, of a thinking animal, my heart acting like an orb filled too big for my chest, not from revulsion, which I have to say I didn't feel, but over-all general misery.
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Saul Bellow |
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d056fe4
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Some powerful magnificence not human in other words, seemed under me. And it was the same mild pink colour, like the water of a watermelon, that did it. At once I recognised the importance of this, as throughout my life I had known these moments when the dumb begin to speak, when I hear the voices of objects and colours; then the physical universe starts to wrinkle and change and heave and rise and smooth, so it seems even the dogs have to ..
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colour
hallucinations
imagery
inspirational
revelation
vision
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Saul Bellow |
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5cb26d9
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It was clear that the man was no fool. But what was the use of not being a fool if you acted like this?
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Saul Bellow |
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83fc7d2
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His mind took one of its odd jumps. He opened a clean page in his grimy notebook, and in the twig-divided shade of a wild cherry, infested with tent caterpillars, he began to make notes for a poem.
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Saul Bellow |
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d12e928
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And the process started over again. Once more it was, Who are you? And I had to confess that I didn't know where to begin.
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Saul Bellow |
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cda7225
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A professor from UBC observed that he agreed with Alexander Pope about the ultimate unreality of evil. Seen from the highest point of metaphysics. To a rational mind, nothing bad ever really happens. He was talking high-minded balls. Twaddle! I thought. I said, 'Oh? Do you mean that every gas chamber has a silver lining?
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gallows-humour
holocaust
jewish
metaphysics
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Saul Bellow |
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17ee3f8
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Nobody should be a mystery intentionally. Unintentionally is mysterious enough.
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Saul Bellow |
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a9ccc01
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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."
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Saul Bellow |
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ec5baca
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Every twenty years or so the earth renews itself in young maidens. You know what I mean? Her cheeks had the perfect form that belongs to the young; her hair was kinky gold. Her teeth were white and posted on every approach. She was all sweet corn and milk. Blessings on her hips. Blessings on her thighs. Blessings on her soft little fingers which were somewhat covered by the cuffs of her uniform. Blessings on that rough gold. A wonderful lit..
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Saul Bellow |
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0f47d10
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I suppose, he was thinking, that we heard this tale of the Herzogs ten times a year. Sometimes Mama told it, sometimes he. So we had a great schooling in grief. I still know these cries of the soul. They lie in the breast, and in the throat. The mouth wants to open wide and let them out. But all these are antiquities -- yes, Jewish antiquities originating in the Bible, in a Biblical sense of personal experience and destiny. What happened du..
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Saul Bellow |
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cea6c99
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We were friends, somehow. But in the end, somehow, he intended to be a mortal enemy. All the while that he was making the gestures of a close and precious friend he was fattening my soul in a coop till it was ready for killing
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Saul Bellow |
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c3a947c
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Socrates tried to soothe us, true enough. He 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. This is not absolutely comforting either. Anyway it was natural that theology and philosophy should take the deepest interest in this. They owe it to us not to be boring themselves. On this obligation they don't always make good. However, Kierkegaar..
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ennui
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Saul Bellow |
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9ea30d4
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Your authority and my degeneracy are one in the same.
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law
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Saul Bellow |
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de67cca
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She was cuckoo about dime stores, where she bought cosmetics and pins and combs. After we locked the expensive purchases in the station wagon we went into McCory's or Kresge's and were there by the hour, up and down the aisles with the multitude, mostly of women, and in the loud-played love music. Some things Thea liked to buy cheaply, they maybe gave her the best sense of the innermost relations of pennies and nickels and explained the rea..
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Saul Bellow |
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07db373
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And I dreamed down at the clouds, and thought that when I was a kid I had dreamed up at them, and having dreamed at the clouds from both sides as no other generation of men has done, one should be able to accept his death very easily.
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Saul Bellow |
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58ae1e1
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Going up, Herzong found a bouquet of violets, dropped from the hand of a woman. Perhaps a bride. Little perfume remained in them, but they made him remember... These violets smelled to him like female tears. He gave them a burial in the trash ca, hoping they had not dropped from a disappointed hand.
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Saul Bellow |
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332fcfe
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The paltriness of these sexual struggles.
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Saul Bellow |
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8da90dc
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he concluded,
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Saul Bellow |
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9465c85
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To him, perpetual thought of death was a sin. Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.
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Saul Bellow |
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af5f5ca
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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.
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the-ocean
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Saul Bellow |
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173755c
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In the peculiar fate of people that makes them fat and rich, when this happens very swiftly there is the menace of the dreamy state that plunders their reality. Let's say that anyway old age and death would come, so why shouldn't the passage be comfortable? But this proposal doesn't make a firm mind, in the strange area where things swim too fast. Against this trouble thought may be a remedy; force of person is another one, and money and bi..
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Saul Bellow |
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f0746df
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Maybe America didn't need art and inner miracles. It had so many outer ones. The USA was a big operation, very big. The more it, the less we.
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Saul Bellow |