Saul Bellow Quotes

In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life.

I have often thought that when I do die it will be of sheer boredom.

Do we fear suffering or apathy most? Is it from experience or the monotony of a commonplace existence that we quickest flee?

And yet still I worried. I like being a person. I wanted to keep at it. Worry is yet another side effect of dying.

I think it's my job or the artist's job, to try and find some solution or some reason to accept things. But given the grimmest reality, I feel the grimmest facts are the real facts, the true facts: that you're born, you die, you suffer, it's to no purpose, and you're gone forever, ever, ever, and that's it.

But the real, tremendous truth is this: suffering serves no purpose whatever.

They say that death kills you, But death doesn't kill you. Boredom and indifference kill you.

A man should be mourned at his birth, not at his death.

I feel monotony and death to be almost the same.

I am afraid of death, scared by it. I already don't know whether I exist or not. So dying really terrifies me.

I would love to have faith. When you take God out of the universe, there is no-one taking care us - we are just parcels of meat, collections of atoms - we have a little flowering on Earth, and then we're gone.

You can actually be bored stiff while you're dying.

Life and death are important. Don't suffer them in vain.

Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

Life and death have been lacking in my life.

Death threatens our speech with futility because death is not just a biological event - it is a reality we fear may rob our living of any significance.

Don’t ask me those questions! Don’t ask me what life means or how we know reality or why we have to suffer so much. Don’t talk about how nothing feels real, how everything is coated with gelatin and shining like oil in the sun. I don’t want to hear about the tiger in the corner or the Angel of Death or the phone calls from John the Baptist.

The only people who don't have problems are in a cemetery.

That's not a real answer.' Says who?' Says me. I mean real fear, like of failure, of death, of regret. Like that. Something that keeps you awake nights, questioning your very existence.' Clowns.

Birth, death, and suffering all bring us to the very edge of what our minds can understand.

No one survives life.

Life is first boredom, then fear.

Hear this or not, as you will. Learn it now, or later -- the world has time. Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui -- these are the true hero's enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real.

We’re going to die and not even know. We’ll never know, and all this meaninglessness will just go on and on and on. And we won’t any longer be witnesses to it. We won’t have even that little bit of power to give meaning to it in our minds. We’ll just be gone, dead, dead, dead, without ever knowing!