"Seize the Day"

[fiefoe]

I think I picked the wrong Saul Bellow book.

• He had on a rich brown suit; the cuffs embarrassed the hairs on his small hands.
• Wilhelm had lied first boastfully and then out of charity to himself.
• Wilhelm was especially horrified by the cynicism of successful people.
• This Wilky.. was assigned to be the carrier of a load which was his own self, his characteristic self... who is a visionary sort of animal. Who has to believe that he can know why he exists.
• Wilhelm also knew that when he began to talk about thse things he made himself feel worse, he became congested with them and worked himself into a clutch.
• He had tried to unburden himself and instead, Wilhelm thought, he had to undergo an inquisition to prove himself worthy of a sympathetic word.
• ... to carry his peculiar burden, to feel shame and impotence, to taste these quelled tears - the only important business... Maybe the making of mistakes expressed the very purpose of his life.
• So, from the moment when he tasted the peculiar flavor of fatality in Dr. Tamkin, he could no longer keep back the money.

• He had always been a vain man. To see how his father loved himself sometimes made Wilhelm madly indignant.
• The doctor had created his own praise. People were primed and did not know it. In a hotel where.. contacts were so breif and had such small weight,.. He could be in people's thoughts here and there for a moment; in and then out.
• He felt that by disliking Margaret from the first and disapproving of the marriage he had done all that he could be expected to do.
• He seemed to sense that he would not lose Dr. Adler's favor by taking an ironic tone with his son.

* He asked for a hint, and he named the figures not idly but with a sort of hugging relish.
* He spoke of things that mattered, and as very few people did this he could take you by surprise, excite you, move you.

* Every other man spoke a language entirely his own, which he had figured out by private thinking.
* Every man realizes that he has to love something or somebody. He feels that he must go outward. 'If thou canst not love, what art thou?'
* On that very same afternoon he didn't hold so high an opinion of this same onrush of loving kindness... As they had the capacity and must use it once in a while, people were bound to have such involuntary feelings.

* Under the changes of weather it may look like marble or like sea water, black as slate in the fog, white as tufa in sunlight. This morning it looked like the image of itself reflected in deep water, white and cumulous above, with cavernous distortions underneath.