Ravelstein Quotes

“Associate with the noblest people you can find; read the best books; live with the mighty; but learn to be happy alone.”
― Saul Bellow, Ravelstein

“Strict seriousness was far more dangerous than any joke.”
― Saul Bellow, Ravelstein

“A human soul devoid of longing was a soul deformed, deprived of its highest good, sick unto death.”
― Saul Bellow, Ravelstein

“The challenge of modern freedom, or the combination of isolation and freedom which confronts you, is to make yourself up. The danger is that you may emerge from the process as a not-entirely-human creature.
(Referenced in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People by Toby Young)”
― Saul Bellow, Ravelstein

“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?”
― Saul Bellow, Ravelstein

“Ravelstein mentioned that Keynes had married a Russian ballerina. He also explained to me that Uranus had fathered Aphrodite but that she had had no mother. She was conceived by the sea foam. He would say such things not because he thought I was ignorant of them but because he judged that I needed at a given moment to have my thoughts directed toward them.”
― Saul Bellow, Ravelstein

“It means that writers are supposed to make you laugh and cry. That’s what mankind is looking for.”
― Saul Bellow, Ravelstein

“It's no small matter to become rich and famous by saying exactly what you think — to say it in your own words, without compromise.”
― Saul Bellow, Ravelstein

“Man is a creature who has something to say about everything under the sun.”
― Saul Bellow, Ravelstein

“But the Jews feel that the world was created for each and every one of us, and when you destroy a human life you destroy an entire world—the world as it existed for that person.”
― Saul Bellow, Ravelstein

“Odd that mankind’s benefactors should be amusing people. In America at least this is often the case. Anyone who wants to govern the country has to entertain”
― Saul Bellow, Ravelstein

“Nine-tenths of modern innocence is little more than indifference to vice, a resolve not to be affected by all that you might read, hear, or see.”
― Saul Bellow, Ravelstein

“Those jerks playing chevalier à votre service? Of course it’s just a game. But the women get a kick”
― Saul Bellow, Ravelstein

“One reason why violence is so popular may be that psychiatric insights have worn us out and we get satisfaction from seeing them blown away with automatic weapons,”
― Saul Bellow, Ravelstein

“American nihilism was nihilism without the abyss.”
― Saul Bellow, Ravelstein

“I was never more out of line than when we stood together in the judge’s chambers to be married.”
― Saul Bellow, Ravelstein

“He said that Ivan Ilyich had made a marriage de convenance, and that if he and his wife had loved each other things would have looked different.”
― Saul Bellow, Ravelstein

“And what people called culture was nothing but a fancier term for their ignorance.”
― Saul Bellow, Ravelstein

“Such a volume of hatred and denial of the right to live has never been heard or felt, and the will that willed their death was confirmed and justified by a vast collective agreement that the world would be improved by their disappearance and their extinction.”
― Saul Bellow, Ravelstein

“the observations you make crowd out the main point.”
― Saul Bellow, Ravelstein

“On the telephone she chirped like Papagena.”
― Saul Bellow, Ravelstein

“The Jews had better understand their status with respect to myth. Why should they have any truck with myth? It was myth that demonized them.”
― Saul Bellow, Ravelstein

“Either she had in mind men she had liked in the past, or she had some male principle of her own to follow, a Jungian masculine counterpart, her particular animus or inborn vision of a man—unconscious, of course.”
― Saul Bellow, Ravelstein

“For that matter, why did Molly marry Leopold Bloom? Her answer was “Well as well him as another.”
― Saul Bellow, Ravelstein

“Nothing like a French word to neutralize an American danger.”
― Saul Bellow, Ravelstein

“The best we can hope for in modernity is not love but a sexual attachment—a bourgeois solution, in bohemian dress. I mention bohemianism because we need to feel that we are liberated.”
― Saul Bellow, Ravelstein

“And then the husband is pushed onstage in a wheelchair by the wife. He looks very weak. Muffled in blankets like an invalid. The wife is blooming. She is dressed for tennis and has the racket under her arm. She fusses over him, tucks him in, kisses him. His eyes are closed. He looks like death. She says, ‘Rest, darling, I’ll be back after my set—real real soon.”
― Saul Bellow, Ravelstein

“You’re even a faithful husband. You served day after day after day with no time off for good behavior or applying for parole.”
― Saul Bellow, Ravelstein

“I had no intention, however, of removing, by critical surgery, the metaphysical lenses I was born with.”
― Saul Bellow, Ravelstein

“People can’t be expected to live without love or the simulacrum of love. A nice friendly sexual connection is what most have to settle for.”
― Saul Bellow, Ravelstein