Matthew Busick

“Never has any country given its people so many toys to play with or sent such highly gifted individuals to the remotest corners of idleness, as close as possible to the frontiers of pain.”
― Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift

“My very fingertips rehearsed how they would work the keys of the trumpet, imagination's trumpet, when I got ready to blow it at last. The peals of that brass would be heard beyond the earth, out in space itself. When that Messiah, that savior faculty the imagination was roused, finally we could look again with open eyes upon the whole shining earth.”
― Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift

“Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death.”
― Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift

“For to be fully conscious of oneself as an individual is also to be separated from all else.”
― Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift