I recently read a book by one of my favorite authors, Saul Bellow. Go figure. Here are a few quotes from THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH. Seaoat would like this book because it's about a Chicagoan.
The Adventures of Augie March Quotes
“Boredom is the conviction that you can't change ... the shriek of unused capacities.”
― Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March
“I mean you have been disappointed in love, but don't you know how many things there are to be disappointed in besides love? You are lucky to be still disappointed in love. Later it may be even more terrible.”
― Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March
“Some people, if they didn't make it hard for themselves, might fall asleep.”
― Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March
“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. But a man's character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn't any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.”
― Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March
“How should I know why! I didn't invent human beings, Iggy.”
― Saul Bellow, The Adventures Of Augie March
“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.”
― Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March
“Is love supposed to ruin you? It seems to me you shouldn't destroy yourself out of life for purposes of love--or what good is it?”
― Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March
“Guys like you make life easy for some women.”
― Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March
“External life being so mighty, the instruments so huge and terrible, the performances so great, the thoughts so great and threatening, you produce a someone who can exist before it. You invent a man who can stand before the terrible appearances. This way he can't get justice and he can't give justice, but he can live. And this is what mere humanity always does. It's made up of these inventors or artists, millions and millions of them, each in his own way trying to recruit other people to play a supporting role and sustain him in his make-believe... That's the struggle of humanity, to recruit others to your version of what's real.”
― Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March
“Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing you hold down the adjoining.”
― Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March
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“With small nose, gross thighs, and those back-bent smoke-dyed fingers, he obliged me with this explanation, and he thought to have more effect on me than he really ever could have. When I didn't argue he was satisfied that he had persuaded me, and was not the first to make that mistake.”
― Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March
“Therefore we didn't talk of genuine things.”
― Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March
“Not that life should end is so terrible in itself, but that it should end with so many disappointments in the essential.”
― Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March
“Sometimes I wished I could become a shoemaker too.”
― Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March
“In the end you can't save your soul and life by thought. But if you think, the least of the consolation prizes is the world.”
― Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March
“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.”
― Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March
“It wasn't that he was specially ungenerous but that he put things off to give his generosity a longer and more significant route.”
― Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March
“Did I say that the world had never had better color? I left something out of account, a limping, crippled consideration which seems to lose ground as you reach beauty and Orizaba flowers, but soon you find it has preceded you.”
― Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March
“Yes, these business people have great energy. There’s a question as to what’s burned to produce it and what things we can and can’t burn.”
― Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March
“I knew by this time what Thea thought of these people and in fact of most people, with their faulty humanity. She couldn't stand them. And what her eccentricity amounted to was that she proposed a different kind of humanity altogether. I guess nothing restrains people from demanding ideal conditions. Very little restrains them from anything. Thea's standard was high, but she wasn't exactly to blame as having arbitrarily set it high. For when she talked to me about some particular person she'd be more frightened than scornful. People with whom she had to struggle scared her, and what I'd call average hypocrisy, just the incidental little whiffs of the social machine, was terribly hard on her. As for greediness or envy, fat self-smelling of appreciation, hates and destructions, fraud, gnawing, she had a very poor tolerance of them, and I'd see her go out in the eyes in a really dangerous way at a gathering.”
― Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March
“That’s the struggle of humanity, to recruit others to your version of what’s real”
― Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March
"Boredom is the conviction that you can't change ... the shriek of unused capacities.”
― Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March