Paul Bowles Quotes

I have the feeling you are primarily two people,one of which should be killed.

If she could only give up, relax, and live in the perfect knowledge that there was no hope.

It made her sad to realise that in spite of their so often having the same reactions, the same feelings, they never would reach the same conclusions, because their respective aims in life were almost...

He doesn't know what the world is like today. The thought that his own conception of the world was so different from his father's was like a protecting wall around his entire being. When his father we...

If people are living the same as always, with their bellies full of food, they'll just go on the same way. If they get hungry and unhappy enough, something happens.

It's a madhouse, of course. A complete, utter madhouse. I only hope to God it remains one.

The bar was stuffy and melancholy. It was full of the sadness inherent in all deracinated things.

You want us all to be snake-charmers and scorpion-eaters, he raged, at one point in their conversation ...Naturally, Eunice replied in her most provoking manner. It would be far preferable to being a...

At least you can say you were in on the last days of Morocco, he told her. How's your tea? Finished? I think we ought to be going.

Even the smallest measure of time is greater than the greatest measure of space. Or is that a lie? Does it only seem so to us, because we can never get it back?

He knew it was necessary to drive the French out, but he had always imagined that this would be done gloriously, with thousands of men on horseback flashing their swords and calling upon Allah to aid...

Here we say that life is a cliff, and you must never turn around and look back when you’re climbing.

In reality the gatherings were held in order to entertain these few Moslem guests, to whom the unaccountable behavior of Europeans never ceased to be a fascinating spectacle. Most of the Europeans, of...

When they had gone the Moungari fell silent, to wait through the cold hours for the sun that would bring first warmth, then heat, thirst, fire, visions. The next night he did not know where he was, di...

You know, everyone here's got some little peccadillo he's hoping to hide.

The Istiqlal was powerful, which did not at all coincide with his conception of it, nor with the picture the organization painted of itself: a purely defensive group of selfless martyrs who were willi...

But there was never any knowing or any certitude; the time to come always had more than one possible direction.

Death is always on its way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life....we get to think of life as an inexhaustable well. Yet everything happ...

He awoke, opened his eye. The room meant very little to him; he was too deeply immersed in the non-being from which he had just come. If he had not the energy to ascertain his position in time and spa...

How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or...