Saul Bellow cytaty

strona 4

„Historia bierze każdego na darmową przejażdżkę.”

„Kłopot prasy polega na tym, że nic co normalne, nie jest interesujące.”

„Gdzie na krzaku róż widać różnice natężenia żaru, co sprawia, że człowiek czuje w różnych miejscach trzewi ssanie, w czymś na kształt odzewu. Gdy nawet róża zgnilizny i zła wywołuje chęć reakcji i podniecenie. I co również znaczy, że żar, który w człowieku krąży i ogrzewa go, kiedy się skupi na jakiejś przeszkodzie lub luce, wówczas wyrzuca do wewnątrz lub na zewnątrz typowe ogniste węgielki lub wypryski znacząc szlak gorączki lub ognia, czego odpowiednikiem jest ciemność i chłodne luki. A więc są płonące róże, są wypryski i luki w obwodzie. Rzadko się zdarza, by w nas nie było tych luk i zakłóceń.”

„Konieczność uwalnia od męki wyboru.”

“I am an American, Chicago born — Chicago, that somber city — and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.”

“Any artist should be grateful for a naïve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.”

“A good American makes propaganda for whatever existence has forced him to become.”

“When we read the best nineteenth- and twentieth-century novelists, we soon realize that they are trying in a variety of ways to establish a definition of human nature, to justify the continuation of life as well as the writing of novels.”

“No realistic, sane person goes around Chicago without protection.”

“It seems hard for the American people to believe that anything could be more exciting than the times themselves. What we read daily and view on the TV has thrust imagined forms into the shadow. We are staggeringly rich in facts, in things, and perhaps, like the nouveau riche of other ages, we want our wealth faithfully reproduced by the artist.”

“The book of the world, so richly studied by autodidacts, is being closed by the “learned,” who are raising walls of opinions to shut the world out.”

“Apparently the rise of consciousness is linked to certain kinds of privation. It is the bitterness of self-consciousness that we knowers know best. Critical of the illusions that sustained mankind in earlier times, this self-consciousness of ours does little to sustain us now. The question is: which is disenchanted, the world itself or the consciousness we have of it?”

“Psychoanalysis pretends to investigate the Unconscious. The Unconscious by definition is what you are not conscious of. But the Analysts already know what’s in it. They should, because they put it all in beforehand. It's like an Easter Egg hunt.”

“A millennial belief in a Holy God may have the effect of deepening the soul, but it is also obviously archaic, and modern influences would presently bring me up to date and reveal how antiquated my origins were. To turn away from those origins, however, has always seemed to me an utter impossibility. It would be a treason to my first consciousness to un-Jew myself.”

“The late philosopher Morris R. Cohen of CCNY was asked by a student in the metaphysics course, “Professor Cohen, how do I know that I exist?” The keen old prof replied, “And who is asking?””

“Reading Decline of the West I learned that in Spengler’s view ours was a Faustian civilization and that we, the Jews, were Magians, the survivors and representatives of an earlier type, totally incapable of comprehending the Faustian spirit that had created the great civilization of the West. … What Magians were to Faustians, Faustians might very well be to Americans.”