Choose language

Forgot your password?

Need a Spoofbox account? Create one for FREE!

No subscription or hidden extras

Login


For instance? Well, for instance, what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organized power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the late failure of radical hopes. In a society that was no community and devalued the person. Owing to the multiplied power of numbers which made the self negligible. Which spent military billions against foreign enemies but would not pay for order at home. Which permitted savagery and barbarism in its own great cities. At the same time, the pressure of human millions who have discovered what concerted efforts and thoughts can do. As megatons of water shape organisms on the ocean floor. As tides polish stones. As winds hollow cliffs. The beautiful supermachinery opening a new life for innumerable mankind. Would you deny them the right to exist? Would you ask them to labor and go hungry while you yourself enjoyed old-fashioned Values? You—you yourself are a child of this mass and a brother to all the rest. or else an ingrate, dilettante, idiot. There, Herzog, thought Herzog, since you ask for the instance, is the way it runs.


Saul Bellow


#machinery #modernism #obscurity #science #beauty



Quote by Saul Bellow

Read through all quotes from Saul Bellow



About Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow Quotes



Did you know about Saul Bellow?

When Bellow was nine his family moved to the Humboldt Park neighborhood of Chicago the city that was to form the backdrop of many of his novels. " Bellow's protagonists in one shape or another all wrestle with what Corde (Albert Corde the dean in "The Dean's December") called "the big-scale insanities of the 20th century. ) Bellow celebrated his birthday in June although he may have been born in July (in the Jewish community it was customary to record the Hebrew date of birth which does not always coincide with the Gregorian calendar).

Bellow grew up as an insolent slum kid a "thick-necked" rowdy and an immigrant from Quebec. " This transcendence of the "unutterably dismal" (a phrase from Dangling Man) is achieved if it can be achieved at all through a "ferocious assimilation of learning" (Hitchens) and an emphasis on nobility. In the words of the Swedish Nobel Committee his writing exhibited "the mixture of rich picaresque novel and subtle analysis of our culture of entertaining adventure drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic conversation all developed by a commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating insight into the outer and inner complications that drive us to act or prevent us from acting and that can be called the dilemma of our age.

back to top