Saul Bellow citations (103 citations, Page 3)

Attributed in Fun Fitness for Families (2005) by James Steffen, p. 24 and later publications; also attributed to Helmut Schmidt, in The 7 Ultimate Secrets to Weight Loss (2011) by Natasa Denman, p. 31 and later publications.
Disputed

“Can we find nothing good to say about TV? Well, yes, it brings scattered solitaries into a sort of communion. TV allows your isolated American to think that he participates in the life of the entire country. It does not actually place him in a community, but his heart is warmed with the suggestion (on the whole false) that there is a community somewhere in the vicinity and that his atomized consciousness will be drawn back toward the whole.”

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Saul Bellow

"The Distracted Public" (1990), p. 159
It All Adds Up (1994)

“We are free to withdraw (to withdraw our minds where we cannot withdraw our bodies) from situations in which our humanity or lack of it is defined for us.”

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Saul Bellow

Part II, p. 29
A Jewish Writer in America (2011)

“One naturally regrets not being an expert or one of those insiders who thoroughly understand. It's hell to be an amateur. A little reflection calms your sorrow, however. The experts in their own little speedboat, the rest of us floating with the rest of mankind in a great barge — that is the picture.”

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Saul Bellow

"The Day They Signed the Treaty" (1979), p. 224
It All Adds Up (1994)

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

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Saul Bellow

"The Jefferson Lectures" (1977), p. 139
It All Adds Up (1994)

“Anxiety destroys scale, and suffering makes us lose perspective.”

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Saul Bellow

"The Sealed Treasure" (1960), p. 62
It All Adds Up (1994)

“If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.”

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Saul Bellow

If women are to have the same duties as men, they must have the same nurture and education. — Plato, The Republic, Book V, trans. Benjamin Jowett, third edition, Oxford University Press, 1892 http://oll.libertyfund.org/Home3/HTML.php?recordID=0345#hd_lf131.3.head.017 <br class="br">Misattributed <br class="br">Variante: So if we are going to use men and women for the same purposes, they must be taught the same things. The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee [Penguin Classics, 2003, ISBN 0-140-449140-0], p. 161 <br class="br">Variante: Then if we are to use the women for the same things as the men, we must teach them the same things. The Republic, trans. W. H. D. Rouse [Signet Classic, 1999, ISBN 0-451-52745-3], p. 249

“Tocqueville predicted that in democratic countries the public would demand larger and larger doses of excitement and increasingly stronger stimulants from its writers. He probably did not expect that public to dramatize itself so extensively, to make the world scene everybody's theatre, or, in the developed countries, to take to alcohol and drugs in order to get relief from the horrors of ceaseless intensity, the torment of thrills and distractions. A great many writers have done little more than meet the mounting demand for thrills. I think that this demand has, in the language of marketing, peaked.”

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Saul Bellow

"The Distracted Public" (1990)
It All Adds Up (1994)

“What is imposed on us by birth and environment is what we are called upon to overcome.”

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Saul Bellow

Part I, p. 28
A Jewish Writer in America (2011)

“Our media make crisis chatter out of news and fill our minds with anxious phantoms of the real thing — a summit in Helsinki, a treaty in Egypt, a constitutional crisis in India, a vote in the U. N., the financial collapse of New York. We can't avoid being politicized (a word as murky as the condition which it describes) because it is necessary after all to know what is going on. Worse yet, what is going on will not let us alone. Neither the facts nor the deformations, the insidious platitudes of the media (tormenting because the underlying realities are so large and so terrible), can be screened out. The study of literature itself is heavily "politicized."”

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Saul Bellow

To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account (1976) [Viking/Penguin, 1998, ISBN 0-141-18075-7], p. 21
General sources

“We take foreigners to be incomplete Americans — convinced that we must help and hasten their evolution.”

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Saul Bellow

" A Second Half Life" (1991), p. 324
It All Adds Up (1994)

“In politics continental Europe was infantile — horrifying. What America lacked, for all its political stability, was the capacity to enjoy intellectual pleasures as though they were sensual pleasures. This is what Europe offered, or was said to offer.”

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Saul Bellow

"My Paris" (1983), p. 235
It All Adds Up (1994)

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

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Saul Bellow livre Humboldt's Gift

Humboldt's Gift (1975), p. 265
General sources

“The university, in a society ruled by public opinion, was to have been an island of intellectual freedom where all views were investigated without restriction. … But by consenting to play an active or “positive,” a participatory role in society, the university has become inundated and saturated with the backflow of society’s “problems.” Preoccupied with questions of Health, Sex, Race, War, academics make their reputations and their fortunes. … Any proposed reforms of liberal education which might bring the university into conflict with the whole of the U. S. A. are unthinkable. Increasingly, the people “inside” are identical in their appetites and motives with the people “outside” the university.”

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Saul Bellow

Source: Introduction to The Closing of the American Mind (1988), p. 18

“We mustn't forget how quickly the visions of genius become the canned goods of intellectuals.”

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Saul Bellow livre Herzog

Herzog (1964) [Penguin Classics, 2003, ISBN 0-142-43729-8], p. 82
General sources

“People reserve their best thinking for their professional specialties and, next in line, for serious matters confronting the alert citizen —economics, politics, the disposal of nuclear waste, etc. The day’s work done, they want to be entertained.”

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Saul Bellow

Source: Introduction to The Closing of the American Mind (1988), p. 16

“Pointless but intense excitement holds us in TV dramas. We hear threatening music. A killer with a gun steals into the bedroom of a sleeping woman. More subliminal sounds of danger, pointlessly ominous. The woman wakes and runs into the kitchen for a knife. The cops are on the case. We watch as the criminal is pursued through night streets; shots, a death; a body falls from a roof. Then time is up, another drama begins. Now we are in a church. No, we are in a lecture hall; no again — a drawer opens in a morgue. A woman is looking for her kidnapped child. Then that ends, and we are on the veld with zebras and giraffes. Then with Lenin at a mass meeting. And suddenly we flash away to a cooking school; we are shown how to stuff a turkey. Next the Berlin Wall comes down. Or flags are burning. Or a panel is worrying about the rug crisis. More and more public themes, with less and less personal consciousness. Clearly, personal consciousness is shrinking.”

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Saul Bellow

"The Distracted Public" (1990), pp. 159-160
It All Adds Up (1994)

“California's like an artificial limb the rest of the country doesn't really need. You can quote me.”

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Saul Bellow

"Saul Bellow: Treading on the Toes of the Brahmans," interview with Lawrence Grobel in Endangered Species: Writers Talk about Their Craft, Their Visions, Their Lives [Da Capo, 2001, ISBN ISBN 0-306-81004-2], p. 21
General sources

“What is art but a way of seeing?”

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Saul Bellow

Thomas Berger, in Being Invisible (1967)
Misattributed