More Die of Heartbreak - Saul Bellow

More people die of heartbreak than of radiation.

The noise of the world is so terrible that we can endure it only by being coated with sleep.

Sense is beaten into people by unhappiness, and that takes time, and time disfigures you.

A change if perspective brought you into a different mental world, and on the floor you had more interesting dreams.

No reason to existing unless your life is a turning point.

Unless you made your life a turning point, there was no reason for existing. Only you didn't make，you  found the turning point that was the crying need( unconscious, of course, as the most crying needs are) of humankind.


To be--that is the artist's greatest pride. He desires no other paradise than existence.
 
An intermittent drizzle came down from a lighted sky, not a gloomy one. When you were under the trees you heard it dropping through the transparent new leaves.

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. Next 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, and you see the ravages everywhere, why not be sensible and sign off early?”

“Because of immortal longings,” I said. “Or just hoping for a lucky break.”

When people decide to put their ingenuity into any special field, they always go too far. It can become a kind of inferno.

To tell it as I see it, and as briefly as possible, it's about the dreariness of what Swedenborg called "mere nature," the boredom of eternal enclosure in a fixed circle, weather cosmic or personal, which makes prisoners of us. A fixed world of matter and energy, don't you see. The Solomonic wisdom of "nothing new under the sun" or "eternal recurrence"-- a closed circle, and a closed circle is a prison.

The city is better to look at than to be in.

There's a curious existence if you  try to think of it not as an evolutionary result but as somebody's invention. What sort of mind would have dreamed up that?

A tree is not merely a natural object, it is a Sign. There are correspondence. Objects, beautiful or ugly, are communications. A human face gives information, as do colors, shapes, fragrances.

It was gaunt winter that day, gray skies that made nature's bones stand out white.

The secret motive of the absentminded is to be innocent while guilty. Absentmindedness is spurious innocence.

Something has to be done to limit the number if people whose opinions can affect us. Unless they care for us, or have done us some good, or hold out some promise, why should their views matter?

"How do I know what I think till I see what I say?" This is true, as far as it goes.

In some cases the heart takes early retirement.

But Everybody is more familiar with the absence if 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.

It's goodbye to reality when love sets in.

Schopenhauer said that money was abstract happiness. Maybe it was Hegel.

Freud taught that love is over-valuation. That is, if you saw the love object as it really was, you couldn't love it.

...modes of seeing were matters of destiny, that what is sent forth by the seer affects what is seen.

A Phoenix who runs after arsonists! ... Burnt to the ground, reincarnated from the ashes. And after all, every return of desire is a form of reincarnation. For after desire departs, no man can be certain that it will ever return. It's like the Yeats poem: "Many times I died,/Many times I rose again."