More Die of Heartbreak Quotes

“Towards the end of your life you have something like a pain schedule to fill out—a long schedule like a federal document, only it's your pain schedule. Endless categories. First, physical causes—like arthritis, gallstones, menstrual cramps. New category, injured vanity, betrayal, swindle, injustice. But the hardest items of all have to do with love. The question then is: So why does everybody persist? If love cuts them up so much....”
― Saul Bellow, More Die of Heartbreak

“Everybody pays the heart lip service, of course, but everybody is more familiar with the absence of love than with its presence and gets so used to the feeling of emptiness that it becomes "normal." You don't miss the foundation of feeling until you begin to look for your self and can't find a support in the affects for a self.”
― Saul Bellow, More Die of Heartbreak

“But it’s a tiresome preoccupation, self-esteem. Something has to be done to limit the number of people whose opinions can affect us.”
― Saul Bellow, More Die of Heartbreak

“The secret of our being still asks to be unfolded. Only now we understand that worrying at it and ragging it is no use. The first step is to stop these oscillations of consciousness that are keeping me awake. Only, before you command the oscillations to stop, before you check out, you must maneuver yourself into a position in which metaphysical aid can approach.”
― Saul Bellow, More Die of Heartbreak

“I believe Uncle’s intuition to have been that plants functioned as sense organs, collecting cosmic data for the earth itself.”
― Saul Bellow, More Die of Heartbreak

“That was nothing to get excited about, as it was one of the commoner human experiences—neither to give a damn nor be given a damn about.”
― Saul Bellow, More Die of Heartbreak

“She liked to give the example of Whistler the painter when he was taken to task by a woman who said, “I never see trees like that.” He told her, “No, ma’am, but don’t you wish you could?” This could be a variation on “Ye have eyes and see not,” an aesthete’s version of it.”
― Saul Bellow, More Die of Heartbreak

“As a man sees, so he is.” The world as it appears to you classifies your mind.”
― Saul Bellow, More Die of Heartbreak

“all the ingenuity of mankind, or as M. Yermelov used to say, intellect without soul, was turned loose—the will of the insane to suffer pouring into erotic channels.”
― Saul Bellow, More Die of Heartbreak

“But in the end I said, ‘It’s terribly serious, of course, but I think more people die of heartbreak than of radiation.”
― Saul Bellow, More Die of Heartbreak

“noise of the world is so terrible that we can endure it only by being coated with sleep. We can give the angels little help from within when they try to instill warmth into us—the warmth of love. And the angels also are fallible.”
― Saul Bellow, More Die of Heartbreak

“On the simplest level he could tell you in detail what he felt—what effects an aspirin had on him, what it did to the back of his neck or the inside of his mouth. I was curious about this, because for the life of them most people can’t describe what goes on inside. Alcoholics or druggies are too confused, hypochondriacs are their own terrorists, and most of us are aware only of a metabolic uproar within.”
― Saul Bellow, More Die of Heartbreak

“me for years that democrats take a low view of themselves, and are brought up to believe they’re insignificant. But turn that around and you come out with megalomania, and we’ve seen plenty of examples of that too.”
― Saul Bellow, More Die of Heartbreak

“Free personalities getting no help from either deaf heaven or neutral earth were facing mortally dangerous choices which would determine the future of civilization.”
― Saul Bellow, More Die of Heartbreak