#Saul Bellow

[quotespile]

Of course, 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.

Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King

#literature #quotes #Saul Bellow #Henderson the Rain King #quote #books #lit

[nobeerreviews]

Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.

-- Saul Bellow

(Cluj, Romania)

#memories #insignificance #distance #saul bellow #travel photography #cluj #romania #quote #evening light

[blackswaneuroparedux]

I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.

- Saul Bellow

Photo: Monica Belluci, 1991.

#bellow #saul bellow #quote #author #literature #arts #inspiration #attention #distraction #creativity #creative process #femme #beauty #monica belluci

[derangedrhythms]

Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything.

Saul Bellow, from 'Humboldt's Gift'

#saul bellow #humboldt's gift #prose #death

[a-girl-and-her-quotes]

Saul Bellow

#Saul Bellow #a girl and her quotes #quote #quotes #quotation #literary quotes #movie quotes #theatre quotes #a quote a day #handwritten quote #handwritten #light pen #words #writing #motivation #life quotes #lit #spilled ink #inspiring #motivation quotes #inspiring quotes #cursive #cursive quote #life quote #thoughts

[molecoledigiorni]

Per me, i soldi non sono un mezzo. Sono io il mezzo dei soldi. Passano attraverso di me – tasse, assicurazioni, ipoteche, mantenimenti dei figli, affitti, parcelle legali. Tutto questo dignitoso sbagliare costa un occhio.

- Saul Bellow

#horzog #saul bellow #citazioni #libri

[thequietabsolute]

A poet is what he is in himself. Gertrude Stein used to distinguish between a person who is an 'entity' and one who has an 'identity.' A significant man is an entity. Identity is what they give you socially. Your little dog recognizes you and therefore you have an identity. An entity, by contrast, an impersonal power, can be a frightening thing. It's as T. S. Eliot said of William Blake. A man like Tennyson was merged into his environment or encrusted with parasitic opinion, but Blake was naked and saw man naked, and from the center of his own crystal. There was nothing of the 'superior person' about him, and this made him terrifying. That is an entity. An identity is easier on itself. An identity pours a drink, lights a cigarette, seeks its human pleasures, and shuns rigorous conditions. The temptation to lie down is very great.

— Saul Bellow, from Humboldt’s Gift

pg., 311

#can i be honesty for a moment while that’s still okay? #😌✌️ nothing on earth today makes me writhe around in anguished BOREDOM more than people talking endlessly about their ‘identities’ #boring boring boring boring #tedium upon boredom atop self lascerating self absorbed privileged boring fucks 🌿 #… ah. allow me these small outbursts of venom #saul bellow #humboldt’s gift #ts elliot #elliot #william blake #alfred lord tennyson #tennyson #blake #poetry #poet #poems #art #artist #english literature #american literature #quote #personal notes #gertrude stein

[nobrashfestivity]

“True.  All too true.  I have never been at home in life.  All my decay has taken place upon a child.”

- Saul Bellow,  Henderson the Rain King

#saul bellow #quotes

[litsnaps]

#literature #quotes #Saul Bellow #Herzog #quote #lit #books #words

[dadsinsuits]

Saul Bellow

#suitdaddy #suiteddaddy #suit and tie #men in suits #suited daddy #suited grandpa #suitedman #suit daddy #daddy #silverfox #suitfetish #buisness suit #suited men #suitedmen #suited man #americans #jewish daddy #Saul Bellow

[thepursuitofunderstanding]

Associate with the noblest people you can find; read the best books; live with the mighty; but learn to be happy alone.

Saul Bellow

#saul bellow #bellow #quotes #philosophy #wisdom #life #literature #writer #books #write #psychology #learn to be happy alone

[quotespile]

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.

Saul Bellow, It All Adds Up

#literature #quotes #Saul Bellow #It All Adds Up #quote #books #lit

[power-chords]

BELLOW: Well, I don't know that the banality of evil is an idea that demystifies—it just blames evil on modern mass civilization and on technological society and says that there is no true evil anymore, that even this has become debased in a mass society. I think that when human beings murder they know what they're doing. If they camouflage their murder by one means or another, the magnitude of the evil doesn't change. Almost any human being knows what it means to take another man's life. What you gain by turning the thing around and blaming it on mass industrial society, saying that this man's mind is a mass of clichés, that he didn't know what he was doing—is to remove the guilt from him and to place it upon society as a whole and upon the rest of us. Until we are convinced that each individual of us has committed murders we cannot be expected to share in that very guilt. I also think also that the heroic, dramatic idea of evil, the idea that one must be a Richard the Third or an lago in order to commit evil, gives evil a sort of literary character. We must simply examine the thing as it is and as it comes and as it happens. So I really do not believe in shifting the blame from the murderer to those of us who, perhaps in our minds, have done violent and terrible things, but who have, in fact, done nothing of the kind. In my own mind this is a distinction between the Jewish and Christian outlook: Jesus said that if you lusted after a woman with your heart then you might as well have committed the adultery. The Jewish outlook is that unless you have actually committed the crime then you are not guilty of it, no matter what you have thought. The mental capacity to do this thing we mustn't forget, but neither must we think that the evil happens in a dream: it happens in fact, and those who commit the evil in fact are in fact evil. Those who only imagine it and suppress it cannot be called evil in the same sense. They have at least overcome the impulse and the temptation—there is a difference between the act and the imagination of the act, which we mustn't forget. If we forget it, we confuse the moral categories. This, I think, is a serious mistake. I also think there is also such a thing as cunning in human beings which enables them to conceal their evil in banality: there's nothing useful in the view that Hitler's scheme of extermination showed a lack of imagination. The evil imagination was very great there, and anyone who describes it as a function of banality is, himself or herself, banal. Hitler's was a conspiracy so vast and subtle that the very idea of blame disappeared from it. This was no small achievement—this was what Mr. Sammler meant when he said that, after all, the evil is too vast to be called banal.

#saul bellow

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.

- Saul Bellow

Westminster Abbey.

#bellow #saul bellow #quote #westminster abbey #design #architecture #church #light #divine #spiritual #christianity #beauty #aesthetics

[derangedrhythms]

True. All too true. I have never been at home in life. 

Saul Bellow, from ‘Henderson the Rain King’

#saul bellow #henderson the rain king #prose #on living #dr

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

"A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep." -- Saul Bellow

#Saul Bellow #ignorance #deliberate ignorance #delusion #self delusion #denial #religion is a mental illness