{"author":"Saul Bellow","author_id":"Saul+Bellow","total_quotes":96,"quotes":[{"text":"I have always had a weakness for footnotes. For me a clever or a wicked footnote has redeemed many a text. And I see that I am now using a long footnote to open a serious subject - shifting in a quick move to Paris, to a penthouse in the Hotel Crillon. Early June. Breakfast time. The host is my good friend Professor Ravelstein, Abe Ravelstein. My wife and I, also staying at the Crillon, have a room below, on the sixth floor. She is still asleep. The entire floor below ours (this is not absolutely relevant but somehow I can't avoid mentioning it) is occupied just now by Michael Jackson and his entourage. He performs nightly in some vast Parisian auditorium. Very soon his French fans will arrive and a crowd of faces will be turned upward, shouting in unison, 'Miekell Jack-sown'. A police barrier holds the fans back. Inside, from the sixth floor, when you look down the marble stairwell you see Michael's bodyguards. One of them is doing the crossword puzzle in the 'Paris Herald'.","author":"Saul Bellow","tags":["michael-jackson","paris"],"id":13782,"author_id":"Saul+Bellow"},{"text":"With one long breath, caught and held in his chest, he fought his sadness over his solitary life. Don't cry, you idiot! Live or die, but don't poison everything...","author":"Saul Bellow","tags":["death","life","solitude"],"id":15534,"author_id":"Saul+Bellow"},{"text":". . . Nietzche himself had a Christian view of history, seeing the present moment always as some crisis, some fall from classical greatness, some corruption or evil to be saved from.","author":"Saul Bellow","tags":["christianity","history","nietzche"],"id":23633,"author_id":"Saul+Bellow"},{"text":"Just then his state of being was so curious that he was compelled , himself, to see it -- eager, grieving, fantastic, dangerous, crazed and, to the point of death, 'comical.' It was enough to make a man pray to God to remove this great, bone-breaking burden of selfhood and self-development, give himself, a failure, back to the species for a primitive cure.","author":"Saul Bellow","tags":["existential","existential-crisis","failure","life","life-lesson","life-meaning"],"id":31237,"author_id":"Saul+Bellow"},{"text":"As the wicked flee when none pursueth, so does the middle-class wrestle when none contendeth. They cried out for freedom, it came down on them in a flood. Nothing remains but a few floating timbers of psychotherapy.","author":"Saul Bellow","tags":["america","freedom","middle-class"],"id":31847,"author_id":"Saul+Bellow"},{"text":"Moses loved his relatives quite openly and even helplessly . . . It was childish of him; he knew that. He could only sigh at himself, that he should be so undeveloped on that significant side of his nature.","author":"Saul Bellow","tags":["familial-love","family","love"],"id":35224,"author_id":"Saul+Bellow"},{"text":"After much effort to live up to a glorious standard there came fatigue, wan hope, and boredom. I experienced extreme boredom. I saw others experiencing it too, many denying, by the way, that any such thing existed. And finally I decided that I would make boredom my subject matter. That I'd study it. That I'd become the world's leading authority on it. March, that was a red-letter day for humanity. What a field! What a domain! Titanic! Promethean! I trembled before it. I was inspired. I couldn't sleep. Ideas came in the night and I wrote them down, volumes of them. Strange that no one had gone after this systematically.Oh, melancholy, yes, but not modern boredom.","author":"Saul Bellow","tags":["ambition","aspiration","boredom","curiosity","melancholy"],"id":37806,"author_id":"Saul+Bellow"},{"text":"History, memory - that is what makes us human, that, and our knowledge of death: 'by man came death'. For knowledge of death makes us wish to extend our lives at the expense of others. And this is the root of the struggle for power.","author":"Saul Bellow","tags":["death","humanity","power"],"id":39058,"author_id":"Saul+Bellow"},{"text":"More commonly suffering breaks people, crushes them, and is simply unilluminating. You see how gruesomely human beings are destroyed by pain, when they have the added torment of losing their humanity first, so that their death is a total defeat...","author":"Saul Bellow","tags":["death","defeat","endoftheline","heartache","humanity","loss","papercuts","rape"],"id":53472,"author_id":"Saul+Bellow"},{"text":"He didn't ask 'Where will you spend eternity?' as religious the-end-is-near picketers did but rather, 'With what, in this modern democracy, will you meet the demands of your soul?","author":"Saul Bellow","tags":["demands","democracy","soul"],"id":54549,"author_id":"Saul+Bellow"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":96,"pages":10,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}