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Paul Bowles Quotes

Paul Frederic Bowles was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. He became associated with Tangier, where he settled in 1947 and lived for 52 years to the end of his life.

Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making several trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland, and in New York wrote music for theatrical productions, as well as other compositions. He achieved critical and popular success with his first novel The Sheltering Sky , set in French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931.

In 1947, Bowles settled in Tangier, at that time in the Tangier International Zone, and his wife Jane Bowles followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Ceylon during the early 1950s, Tangier was Bowles' home for the remainder of his life. He came to symbolize American immigrants in the city.

Bowles died in 1999 at the age of 88. His ashes are buried near family graves in Lakemont Cemetery, in upstate New York. Wikipedia  

✵ 30. December 1910 – 18. November 1999

Works

The Sheltering Sky
Let It Come Down
Let It Come Down
Paul Bowles
Paul Bowles: 22 quotes8 likes

Famous Paul Bowles Quotes

“Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really.”

Paul Bowles book The Sheltering Sky

The Sheltering Sky (1949)
Context: Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.

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

Paul Bowles book The Sheltering Sky

Source: The Sheltering Sky

“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.”

Paul Bowles

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

Paul Bowles book The Sheltering Sky

Source: The Sheltering Sky

Paul Bowles Quotes

“How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”

Paul Bowles book The Sheltering Sky

The Sheltering Sky (1949)
Context: Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.

“[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.”

Paul Bowles book The Sheltering Sky

Source: The Sheltering Sky

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

Paul Bowles book The Sheltering Sky

Source: The Sheltering Sky

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

Paul Bowles book The Sheltering Sky

Source: The Sheltering Sky

“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.”

Paul Bowles

Source: The Spider's House

“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."”

Paul Bowles book The Sheltering Sky

The Sheltering Sky (1949)

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

Paul Bowles book Let It Come Down

Source: Let It Come Down (1952), p. 238

“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.”

Paul Bowles book The Sheltering Sky

The Sheltering Sky (1949)

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

Paul Bowles book Let It Come Down

Source: Let It Come Down (1952), p. 199

“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.”

Paul Bowles book Up Above the World

Source: Up Above the World (1966), p. 23

“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.”

Paul Bowles book The Sheltering Sky

Source: The Sheltering Sky (1949), p. 210

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

Paul Bowles book Points in Time

Source: Points in Time (1982), p. 28

“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.”

Paul Bowles

Letter to Charles Henri Ford (25 January 1948), as published in In Touch : The Letters of Paul Bowles (1995) edited by Jeffrey Miller, p. 192

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

Paul Bowles book Let It Come Down

Source: Let It Come Down (1952), p. 231

“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.”

Paul Bowles book The Sheltering Sky

Source: The Sheltering Sky (1949), p. 65

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