Extended excerpt [Essay. Book reflects Bellow’s accounts of his travel and impressions during a visit to Israel in 1975]:

“I am, if anything, surprised at myself and at my own assumptions. A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.” (pp. 126-127)

Source: Library – To Jerusalem and Back (1976) International Standard Book Number (ISBN) 014007273X

Extended excerpt: [Interview – excerpt of Bellow’s response to the question, “You’ve mentioned the distractive character of modern life. Would this be most intense in the city?]

I wonder whether there will ever be enough tranquility under modern circumstances to allow our contemporary Wordsworth to recollect anything. I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness that characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.”

Source note: Per interviewer Gordon Lloyd Harper, the interview discussions began in May 1965 and were completed over several weeks in September and October 1965.

Source link: “Saul Bellow, The Art of Fiction No. 37” (Winter 1966) online via The Paris Review: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4405/the-art-of-fiction-no-37-saul-bellow

Extended excerpt: [Fiction]

“Boredom starts with useless effort. You have shortcomings and aren’t what you should be? Boredom is the conviction that you can’t change. You begin to worry about loss of variety in your character and the uncomplimentary comparison with others in your secret mind, and this makes you feel your own tiresomeness.”  (p. 504)

Source: Library – The Adventures of Augie March (1953) International Standard Book Number (ISBN) 0-14-00-7272-1

Extended excerpt: [Fictional dialogue]

“I like such stories. What did he say?” “Not a word. He just nodded his head and took the dime. He stuck it in his pocket and went back to his bigger pals. I guess he felt he had earned it on the ice. It was his fair reward.”

“I see you have these recollections.”

“Well, I need them. Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.” (p. 190)

Source note: From the Mr. Sammler’s Planet publisher notes: “This book originally appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in a different form.”

Source link: Library – Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970) online via Open Library [free subscription service]: https://archive.org/stream/mrsammlersplane00bell#page/190/mode/2up/search/wolf+of+insignificance

Extended excerpt: [Fiction]

“Through them he is connected with the best part of mankind. He feels this and he can never be isolated, left aside. He has a community. I have this six-sided box. And goodness is achieved not in a vacuum, but in the company of other men, attended by love.” (p. 61)

Source: Library – Dangling Man (1944|1965 New American Library ed.) Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) No. 890299

Extended excerpt: [Fiction]

“All human accomplishment has this same origin, identically. Imagination is a force of

nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination. It converts to

actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems!” (p. 271)

Source: Library – Henderson the Rain King (1959|1976 Penguin Books edition) International Standard Book Number (ISBN) 0-14-007269-1

Extended excerpt: [Non-fiction, essay]

“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. This is not to say that fundamental feelings, the moral sentiments so long bred into civilized peoples, have been wiped out altogether, but the sentiments have obviously been unable to keep up with the abominations that have been visited upon us, with the cruelties and crimes of this century.”

Source: Library – It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future (1994) International Standard Book Number (ISBN) 0-670-85331-3

Extended excerpt: [Book foreword]

“In the greatest confusion there is still an open channel to the soul. It may be difficult to find because by midlife it is overgrown, and some of the wildest thickets that surround it grow out of what we describe as our education. But the channel is always there, and it is our business to keep it open, to have access to the deepest part of ourselves.”

Source: Library – The Closing of the American Mind (1987|1988 Simon & Schuster) International Standard Book Number (ISBN) 0-671-65715-1

Extended excerpt: [Letter to friend & fellow author Martin Amis. Amis had lost his father, Kingsley Amis, in October 1995.]

“Last Saturday I attended a memorial service for Eleanor Clark, the widow of R.P. Warren. I found myself saying to her daughter Rosanna that losing a parent is something like driving through a plate-glass window. You didn’t know it was there until it shattered, and then for years to come you’re picking up the pieces – down to the last glassy splinter.”

Source: Library – Saul Bellow: Letters (13 Mar. 1996)

Extended excerpt [Nobel Lecture. Bellow received the 1976 Nobel Prize in Literature “for the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work.”]

“Only art penetrates what pride, passion, intelligence and habit erect on all sides – the seeming realities of the world. There is another reality, the genuine one, which we lose sight of. This other reality is always sending us hints, which without art, we can’t receive. Proust calls these hints our “true impressions.” The true impressions, our persistent intuitions, will, without art, be hidden from us and we will be left with nothing but a “terminology for practical ends which we falsely call life.”

Source link: “Saul Bellow – Nobel Lecture” (12 Dec. 1976) online via Nobel Media AB: https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1976/bellow-lecture.html

Extended excerpt: [Fictional dialogue, chapter VI]

“Perhaps if we were in India or Finland we might not be in quite the same mood. New York makes one think of the collapse of civilization, about Sodom and Gomorrah, the end of the world. The end wouldn’t come as a surprise here. Many people already bank on it.” (p. 304)

Source note: From the Mr. Sammler’s Planet publisher notes: “This book originally appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in a different form.”

Source link: Library – Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970) online via Open Library [free subscription service]: https://archive.org/stream/mrsammlersplane00bell#page/304/mode/2up/search/sodom

Extended excerpt: [Fiction]

“Nothing but grief had ever come of my being honored by the French. Well, that would have to pass. The only real distinction at this dangerous moment in human history and cosmic development has nothing to do with medals and ribbons. Not to fall asleep is distinguished. Everything else is mere popcorn.” (p. 283)

Source note: From the Humbolt’s Gift publishing & copyright page notes: “Portions of this novel first appeared in Esquire, The New York Review of Books, and Playboy.”

Source: Library – Humboldt’s Gift (1975 | 1996 Penguin Books) International Standard Book Number (ISBN) 0-670-38655-3

Extended excerpt: [Fiction]

“He touched the almost homogeneous whiteness with his fingertips and breathed in the water odors and the subtle stink rising from the throat of the waste pipe. Unexpected intrusions of beauty. That is what life is.” (p. 218)

Source: Library – Herzog (1964) Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) No. 279707

Extended excerpt: [From a conversation with Bostonia magazine. Bellow’s interviews with the magazine were published in two parts, the first segment, “A Half Life,” (also included in the It All Adds Up text) was published in the magazine’s November/December 1990 issue. The quote shown here is from “A Second Half Life,” published in Bostonia’s January/February 1991 issue.]

“The immediate American surroundings are so absorbing, so overwhelming. Because our minds are all over the place, we tend to forget that America, like Russia, is not a country, merely, but a world unto itself.

It has always been difficult for us to imagine life on premises different from our own. We take foreigners to be incomplete Americans – convinced that we must help and hasten their evolution.” (p. 324)

Source link: Library – Conversations with Saul Bellow (1994) online via Open Library [free subscription service]: https://archive.org/stream/italladdsupfromd00bell#page/324/mode/2up/search/incomplete+Americans

Extended excerpt: [Essay]

“How do Americans think of New York? That is perhaps like asking how Scotsmen feel about the Loch Ness monster. It is our legendary phenomenon, our great thing, our world-famous impossibility. Some seem to wish that it were nothing more than a persistent rumor. It is, however, as human things go, very real, superreal. What is barely hinted in other American cities is condensed and enlarged in New York. There people feel themselves to be in the middle of things. That is certainly true and it is certainly odd.” (p. 249)

Source: Library – There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction (2015|2016 Penguin edition) International Standard Book Number (ISBN) 978-0-14-310804-7

Extended excerpt [Nobel Lecture. Bellow received the 1976 Nobel Prize in Literature “for the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work.”]

“Writers are greatly respected. The intelligent public is wonderfully patient with them, continues to read them and endures disappointment after disappointment, waiting to hear from art what it does not hear from theology, philosophy, social theory, and what it cannot hear from pure science. Out of the struggle at the center has come an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are, and what this life is for.”

Source link: “Saul Bellow – Nobel Lecture” (12 Dec. 1976) online via Nobel Media AB: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1976/bellow-lecture.html