quotes from Herzog by Saul Bellow

Moses was strongly tempted to lie to her, to say, ‘Yes, Ramona, it was you.’ Strict and literal truthfulness was a trivial game, and might even be a disagreeable neurotic affliction. Ramona had Moses’ complete sympathy — a woman in her thirties, successful in business, independent, but still giving such suppers to gentlemen friends. But in times like these, how should a woman steer her heart to fulfillment? In emancipated New York, man and woman, gaudily disguised, like two savages belonging to hostile tribes, confront each other. The man wants to deceive, and then to disengage himself; the woman’s strategy is to disarm and detain him. And this is Ramona, a woman who knows how to look after herself. Think how it is with some young thing, raising mascara-ringed eyes to heaven, praying, ‘Oh, Lord, not no bad man come into my chubbiness.’

… he was taking comfort from someone who really didn’t have too much of it to spare him. He had seen her when she was tired, upset and weak, when the shadows came over her eyes, when the fit of her skirt was wrong and she had cold hands, cold lips parted on her teeth, when she was lying on her sofa, a woman of short frame, very full, but after all, a tired, short woman whose breath had the ashen flavor of fatigue. The story then told itself — struggles and disappointments; an elaborate system of theory and eloquence at the bottom of which lay the simple facts of need, a woman’s need.

Herzog, Saul Bellow: ‘The perfume of her shoulders reached his nostrils. And, as almost always, he heard the deep, the cosmic, the idiotic masculine response–quack.  The progenitive, the lustful quacking in the depths. Quack. Quack..