"I pretended not to understand. One of life's hardest jobs, to make a quick understanding slow. I think I succeeded, thought Herzog."
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Quote collection
Saul Bellow quotes (page 11 of 12)
231 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Well, everybody has a history."
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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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"It is sometimes necessary to repeat what all know. All mapmakers should place the Mississippi in the same location and avoid originality."
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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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"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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"You have, like the external world, your own phenomena inside."
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"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."
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"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."
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"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."
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"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."
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"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."
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"A writer is a reader moved to emulation."
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"But there are things you can't consult anybody about."
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"Guys like you make life easy for some women."
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"There's a kind of emptiness at the center of life ... nothing to form your life on, or by."
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"If I'm out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog."
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"Death is the black backing on the mirror that allows us to see anything at all."
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"I seem to have the blind self-acceptance of the eccentric who can't conceive that his eccentricities are not clearly understood."
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"I’ve had all the monstrosity I want."
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