Paul Bowles Quotes

#1. Since the world began has any man ever been able to know what would happen tomorrow? The world of men is today. I'm asking you to open your heart today. Tomorrow belongs to Allah ...

Paul Bowles

#2. Whenever he was en route from one place to another, he was able to look at his life with a little more objectivity than usual. it was often on trpis that he thought most clearly, and made the decisions that he could not reach when he was stationary.

Paul Bowles

#3. He could not feel at ease with gourmets and hedonists; they were a hostile species.

Paul Bowles

#4. Tunner's presence created a situation, however slight, which kept him from entering into the reflective state he considered essential.

Paul Bowles

#5. His behavior there was a perfect balance between gentleness and violence that gave her particular delight.

Paul Bowles

#6. Fiction should always steer clear of political considerations.

Paul Bowles

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

Paul Bowles

#8. The sky here's very strange. I often have the sensation when I look at it that it's a solid thing up there, protecting us from what's behind ... [from] nothing, I suppose. Just darkness. Absolute night.

Paul Bowles

#9. The idea that at each successive moment he was deeper into the Sahara than he had been the moment before, that he was leaving behind all familiar things, this constant consideration kept him in a state of pleasurable agitation.

Paul Bowles

#10. The act of living had been enjoyable; at some point when I was not paying attention, it had turned into a different sort of experience, to whose grimness I had grown so accustomed that I now took it for granted.

Paul Bowles

#11. Once you accept the fact that life isn't fun, you'll be much happier, his mother said to him.

Paul Bowles

#12. These empty days. How do you spend them?

Paul Bowles

#13. One of these days the future will be here, and you won't be ready for it.

Paul Bowles

#14. 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

#15. A man could scarcely make his writing a reason for living unless he believed in the validity of that writing.

Paul Bowles

#16. Because neither she nor Port had ever lived a life of any kind of regularity, they had both made the fatal error of coming hazily to regard time as non-existent. One year was like another year. Eventually everything would happen.

Paul Bowles

#17. The writer:
a spy sent into life by the forces of death. His main objective is to get the information across the border, back into death. Then he can be given a mythic personality: 'he spent time among us, betrayed us, and took the material across the border.

Paul Bowles

#18. 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

#19. 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?

Paul Bowles

#20. Everything's explained by the constant intervention of Allah. And whatever happens had to happen, and was decreed at the beginning of time, and there's no way of even imagining how anything could have been different from what it is.

Paul Bowles

#21. After all, the English are really too much. One can't live in that constipated fashion forever.

Paul Bowles

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

Paul Bowles

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

Paul Bowles

#24. It's very hard to write about that which is always beautiful and pleasant and good. You don't get anywhere with it. There's no friction in it. There's no trouble. You have to have trouble. Somebody's got to get in trouble, or no one wants to read it.

Paul Bowles

#25. The soul is the weariest part of the body.

Paul Bowles

#26. [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

#27. If people and their manner of living were alike everywhere, there would not be much point in moving from one place to another.

Paul Bowles

#28. 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

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

Paul Bowles

#30. It was one of the charms of the International Zone that you could get anything you wanted if you paid for it. Do anything, too, for that matter; - there were no incorruptibles. It was only a question of price.

Paul Bowles

#31. Not all the ravages caused by our merciless age are tangible ones. The subtler forms of destruction, those involving only the human spirit, are the most to be dreaded.

Paul Bowles

#32. 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.

Paul Bowles

#33. That was one of the troubles with the Istiqlal, with all politics: you talked about people as though they were not really people, as though they were only things, numbers, animals, perhaps, but not really people.

Paul Bowles

#34. There could be nothing, he reflected, to equal a government which was simply the honest enforcement, by means of the sword, of the laws of Islam.

Paul Bowles

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

Paul Bowles

#36. 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 nation of tenth-rate pseudo-civilized rug-sellers.

Paul Bowles

#37. In the school they teach you what the world means, and once you have learned, you will always know," Amar's father had told him.
"But suppose the world changes?" Amar had thought. "Then what would you know?

Paul Bowles

#38. The only effort worth making is the one it takes to learn the geography of one's own nature.

Paul Bowles

#39. The odious little dogs that French people seemed to like so much rushed out at him as he rode by, barking furiously.

Paul Bowles

#40. How could any young man merely sit back and wait for divine justice to take its course? It was asking the impossible.

Paul Bowles

#41. Before there can be change there must be discontent.

Paul Bowles

#42. Publishers are thieves, they are on the other side of the barricade.

Paul Bowles

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

Paul Bowles

#44. May Allah bless you." Or had she said: "May Allah burn you?" He was not sure which: the two Arabic words sounded so much alike.

Paul Bowles

#45. The people of each country get more like the people of every other country. They have no character, no beauty, no ideals, no culture-nothing, nothing." ...
"Everything's getting gray, and it'll be grayer.

Paul Bowles

#46. Still, he could not think of the mass of Moroccans without contempt. He had no patience with their ignorance and backwardness; if he damned the Europeans with one breath, he was bound to damn the Moroccans with the next. No one escaped but him, and that was because he hated himself most of all.

Paul Bowles

#47. Every second, ten stars set behind the black water in the west.

Paul Bowles

#48. 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

#49. The rest of the world was there for her to take at any moment she wished it, but she always rejected it in favour of her own familiar little cosmos.

Paul Bowles

#50. 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

#51. 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.

Paul Bowles

#52. He still felt coreless - he was no one, and he was standing here in the middle of no country. The place was counterfeit, a waiting room between connections, a transition from one way of being to another, which for the moment was neither way, no way.

Paul Bowles

#53. Tangier is a one-horse town that happens to have its own government.

Paul Bowles

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

Paul Bowles

#55. 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 diametrically opposed.

Paul Bowles

#56. 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?

Paul Bowles

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

Paul Bowles

#58. 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 willing to brave the brutality of the French in order to bring hope to their suffering countrymen.

Paul Bowles

#59. Writing is harmless, and it keeps me in dinners and out of trouble.

Paul Bowles

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

Paul Bowles

#61. Someone once had said to her that the sky hides the night behind it, shelters the person beneath from the horror that lies above. Unblinking, she fixed the solid emptiness, and the anguish began to move in her. At any moment the rip can occur, the edges fly back, and the giant maw will be revealed.

Paul Bowles

#62. Nothing would have meaning, because the knowing was itself the meaning; beyond that there was nothing to know.

Paul Bowles

#63. There's something repulsive about an American without money in his pocket.

Paul Bowles

#64. What a wonderful thing to be an American!" he said impetuously.
"Yes," said Dyar automatically, never having given much thought to what it would be like not to be an American. It seemed somehow the natural thing to be.

Paul Bowles

#65. Life is lived only once. And the less seriously the better.

Paul Bowles

#66. She was saved from prettiness by the intensity of her gaze.

Paul Bowles

#67. If you don't know why you like a thing, it is usually worth your while to attempt to find out.

Paul Bowles

#68. You can't discipline the whole country."
"Still," Moss said dreamily, "that's what must be done before they can ever accomplish anything.

Paul Bowles

#69. The wind blew the dust along the ground into his mouth as he sang.

Paul Bowles

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

Paul Bowles

#71. Only then did he understand that he really wanted to know nothing about El Ga'a beyond the fact that it was isolated and unfrequented, that it was precisely those things he had been trying to ascertain about it.

Paul Bowles

#72. We've never managed, either one of us, to get all the way into life. We're hanging on to the outside for all we're worth, convinced we're going to fall off at the next bump.

Paul Bowles

#73. When I first came here it was a pure country. There was music and dancing and magic every day in the streets.
Now it's finished, everything. Even the religion. In a few more years the whole country will be like all the other Moslem countries, just a huge European slum, full of poverty and hatred.

Paul Bowles

#74. But don't we all like to be overpowered, one time or another.

Paul Bowles

#75. One never took the time to savour the details; one said: another day, but always with the hidden knowledge that each day was unique and fatal, that there never would be a return, another time.

Paul Bowles

#76. It's unnecessary and destructive to think of oneself at all. People ask me, 'What do you think of yourself as?' My answer is, 'Nothing.

Paul Bowles

#77. The key question, it seemed to him, was that of whether man was to obey Nature, or attempt to command her.

Paul Bowles

#78. 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 course, thought the Moslem gentlemen were invited to add local color.

Paul Bowles

#79. Once one had seen her eyes, the rest of the face grew vague, and when one tried to recall her image afterwards, only the piercing, questioning violence of the wide eyes remained.

Paul Bowles

#80. I think that's the point of view of an outsider, a tourist who puts picturesqueness above everything else.

Paul Bowles

#81. And yet always you feel as though you understood perfectly the people and why they do everything as they do.Still you are absolutely severed from them.

Paul Bowles

#82. If you could not have freedom you could still have vengeance.

Paul Bowles

#83. It is a dangerous discovery, because they are going to disregard many vital things in their haste to catch up.

Paul Bowles

#84. That was what he wanted, to be baked dry and hard, to feel the vaporous worries evaporating one by one, to know finally that all the damp little doubts and hesitations that covered the floor of his being were curling up and expiring in the great furnace-blast of the sun.

Paul Bowles

#85. Security is a false God. Begin to make sacrifices to it and you are lost.

Paul Bowles