Paul Bowles Quotes

“The sky hides the night behind it and shelters the people beneath from the horror that lies above.”

“Security is a false God. Begin to make sacrifices to it and you are lost.”

“How fragile we are under the sheltering sky. Behind the sheltering sky is a vast dark universe, and we're just so small.”

“Everyone is isolated from everyone else. The concept of society is like a cushion to protect us from the knowledge of that isolation. A fiction that serves as an anesthetic.”

“The soul is the weariest part of the body.”

“[A]nother important difference between tourist and traveler is that the former accepts his own civilization without question; not so the traveler, who compares it with the others, and rejects those elements he finds not to his liking.”

“She was saved from prettiness by the intensity of her gaze.”

“There is a way to master silence
Control its curves, inhabit its dark corners
And listen to the hiss of time outside”

“Illness reduces man to his basic state: a cloaca in which the chemical processes continue. The meaningless hegemony of the involuntary.”

“The only thing that makes life worth living is the possibility of experiencing now and then a perfect moment. And perhaps even more than that, it's having the ability to recall such moments in their totality, to contemplate them like jewels.”

“So she said banteringly: "What's the unit of exchange in this different world of yours?"
He did not hesitate. "The tear."
"It isn't fair," she objected. "Some people have to work very hard for a tear. Others can have them just for thinking."
"What system of exchange is fair?" he cried, and his voice sounded as if he were really drunk. "And whoever invented the concept of fairness, anyway? Isn't everything easier if you simply get rid of the idea of justice altogether? You think the quantity of pleasure, the degree of suffering is constant among all men? It somehow comes out in the end? You think that? If it comes out even it's only because the final sum is zero."”

“We're all monsters," said Daisy with enthusiasm. "It's the Age of Monsters.”

“Many days later another caravan was passing and a man saw something on top of the highest dune there. And when they went up to see, they found Outka, Mimouna and Aicha; they were still there, lying the same way as when they had gone to sleep. And all three of the glasses… were full of sand. That was how they had their tea in the Sahara.”

“Africa was a big place and would offer its own suggestions”

“Dr Slade went in to lunch in a state of desperate boredom tempered with resentment; it had shaken him a little to see how bad luck could be prolonged to such unlikely lengths.”

“A black star appears, a point of darkness in the night sky's clarity. Point of darkness and gateway to repose. Reach out, pierce the fine fabric of the sheltering sky, take repose.”

“Every second, ten stars set behind the black water in the west.”

“No one can ever heap enough insults upon me to suit my taste. I think we all really thrive on hostility, because it's the most intense kind of massage the ego can undergo. Other people's indifference is the only horror.”

“For God's sake, sit down. You look like a Calvinist rector telling his flock about Hell.”

“For in order to avoid having to deal with relative values, he had long since come to deny all purpose to the phenomenon of existence — it was more expedient and comforting.”