Paul Bowles Quotes

He awoke, opened his eye. The room meant very little to him; he was too deeply immersed in the non-b...

Because neither she nor Port had ever lived a life of any kind of regularity, they had both made the...

When I was young” … “Before I was twenty, I mean, I used to think that life was a thing that kept ga...

He did not look up because he knew how senseless the landscape would appear. It takes energy to inve...

Security is a false god begin making sacrifices to it and you are lost.

the sky here's very strange. I often have the sensation when I look at it that it's a solid thing up...

Not all the ravages caused by our merciless age are tangible ones. The subtler forms of destruction,...

Although this was not a comforting point of view, he did not reject it, because it coincided with on...

Since the world began has any man ever been able to know what would happen tomorrow? The world of me...

How fragile we are under the sheltering sky. Behind the sheltering sky is a vast dark universe, and ...

The insistent drums were an unwelcome reminder of the existence of another world, wholly autonomous,...

nothing would have meaning, because the knowing was itself the meaning; beyond that there was nothin...

...he refused to consider the Moroccans' present culture, however decadent, an established fact, an ...

There's a little war in progress here. There won't be anything left of the place if it goes on at th...

Stenham had always taken it for granted that the dichotomy of belief and behavior was the cornerston...

There are mornings when, from the first ray of light seized upon by the eye, and the first simple so...

Every little thing makes a difference, whether you decide it yourself or whether it’s pure accident....

There could be nothing, he reflected, to equal a government which was simply the honest enforcement,...

...It is far more sinful to pray irregularly than not to pray at all.

You have to hate them, you mean? You can’t decide: I will or I won’t hate them?”Amar did not complet...

Fiction should always steer clear of political considerations.

Often when he was not working he had come here and sat an entire afternoon, lulled by the din and mu...

Yes, but perhaps he did have something to do with it.” (In such arguments Stenham often found himsel...

Looking at him she felt she knew what the people of antiquity had been like. Thirty centuries or mor...

That still did not invalidate their purity in his eyes, so long as they continued to live the way th...

...Amar was made conscious in an instant of a presence in the air, something which had been there al...

May Allah bless you." Or had she said: "May Allah burn you?" He was not sure which: the two Arabic w...

At some point in the night she had a dream. Or it was possible that she was partially awake, and was...

Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler be...

The key question, it seemed to him, was that of whether man was to obey Nature, or attempt to comman...

Having arrived at this point, he had found no direction in which to go save that of further withdraw...

You know what politique is? It is the French word for a lie. Kdoub! Politique! When you hear the Fre...

Decadence, decadence, he said to himself. They’ve lost everything and gained nothing. The French had...

Whenever he was en route from one place to another, he was able to look at his life with a little mo...

The soul is the weariest part of the body.