Saul Bellow People Quotations

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.

I don't like to write from a flat, cold position. You must like what you're doing very much or like the people -- either like them or hate them. You can't be indifferent.

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.

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)

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.

Nobody asks you to love the whole world, only to be honest, ehrlich. Don't have a loud mouth. The more you love people the more they'll mix you up. A child loves, a person respects. Respect is better than love.

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.

It seems, after all that there are no nonpeculiar people.

Human character is smaller now, people don't have durable passions; they've replaced passions with excitement.

And I'm convinced that knowing the names of things braces people up.

Americans must be the most sententious people in history. Far too busy to be religious, they have always felt that they sorely needed guidance.

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.

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.

Some people, if they didn't make it hard for themselves, might fall asleep.

People don't realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature.

Erotic practices have become diversified. Sex used to be a single-crop farming, like cotton or wheat; now people raise all kinds of things.

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

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.