Mr. Sammler's Planet Quotes

“The earth is literally a mirror of thoughts. Objects themselves are embodied thoughts. Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything.”
― Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler's Planet

“The terms which, in his inmost heart, each man knows. As I know mine. As all know. For that is the truth of it — that we all know, God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know.”
― Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler's Planet

“Being right was largely a matter of explanations.”
― Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler's Planet

“Greatness without models? Inconceivable. One could not be the thing itself - Reality. One must be satisfied with symbols. Make it the object of imitation to reach and release the high qualities. Make peace therefore with intermediacy and representations. Otherwise the individual must be the failure he now sees and knows himself to be.”
― Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler's Planet

“The earth was a grave: our life was lent to it by its elements and had to be returned: a time came when the simple elements seemed to long for release from the complicated forms of life, when every element of every cell said, "Enough!" The planet was our mother and our burial ground. No wonder the human spirit wished to leave. Leave this prolific belly. Leave also this great tomb. Passion for the infinite caused by the terror, by timor mortis, needed material appeasement.”
― Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler's Planet

“And everything soon must change. Men would set their watches by other suns than this. Or time would vanish. We would need no personal names of the old sort in the sidereal future, nothing being fixed. We would be designated by other nouns. Days and nights would belong to the museums. The earth a memorial park, a merry-go-round cemetery. The seas powdering our bones like quartz, making sand, grinding our peace for us by the aeon. Well, that would be good - a melancholy good.”
― Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler's Planet

“But fathers are soft on daughters. Look how Dad favors Angela. He gave her ten times more. Because she reminded him of Mae West. He was always smiling at her boobs. He wasn't aware of it. Mother and I saw it.”
― Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler's Planet

“The Indian temperament is so excitable, you know.”
― Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler's Planet

“Who knew what Asiatic form that man's despair was taking ?”
― Saul Bellow, Mr Sammler's Planet

“Wait a minute, though: Sammler denied himself the privilege of the high-principled intellectual who must always be applying the purest standards and thumping the rest of his species on the head. When he tried to imagine a just social order, he could not do it. A non-corrupt society? He could not do that either. There were no revolutions that he could remember which had not been made for justice, freedom, and pure goodness. Their last state was always more nihilistic than the first.”
― Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler's Planet

“He was looking for the Knight of Faith, the real prodigy. That real prodigy, having set its relations with the infinite, was entirely at home in the finite. Able to carry the jewel of faith, making the motions of the infinite, and as a result needing nothing but the finite and the usual. Whereas others sought the extraordinary in the world. Or wished to be what was gaped at.”
― Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler's Planet