Quotes from Malcolm Lowry

Long for me as I for you, forgetting, what will be inevitable, the long black aftermath of pain.

Muzzle a dog and he will bark out of the other end.

How shall the murdered man convince his assassin he will not haunt him.

Good God, if our civilization were to sober up for a couple of days it'd die of remorse on the third.

How, unless you drink as I do, could you hope to understand the beauty of an old Indian woman playing dominoes with a chicken?

Perhaps his tragedy is that he is the only normal writer left on earth -- and it is this that adds to his isolation and so too his so sense of guilt.

Good God, if our civilization were to sober up for a couple of days, it'd die of remorse on the third—

The will of man is unconquerable. Even God cannot conquer it.

My lover. Oh come to me again as once in May.

Under the Volcano" embraces everything from Dante to Freud to the cabala. Here it shambles like Cervantes, there it rages like Ahab, and every page of it pulsates on Out of Body Auto-Reply, that style of pure Lowry that points at once backward, to all European literature, and forward, to the mother of all nervous breakdowns.

Love is the only thing which gives meaning to our poor ways on earth

Hell," he finished absurdly. "Because—" He produced a twenty-peso note and laid it on the table. "I like it," he called to them, through the open window, from outside. Cervantes stood behind the bar, with scared eyes, holding the cockerel. "I love hell. I can't wait to get back there. In fact I'm running, I'm almost back there already.

In the war to come correspondents would assume unheard of importance, plunging through flame to feed the public its little gobbets of dehydrated excrement.

When I should have been producing obscure volumes of verse entitled the Triumph of Humpty Dumpty or the Nose with the Luminous Dong! Or at best, like Clare, weaving fearful vision ... A frustrated poet in every man. Though it is perhaps a good idea under the circumstances to pretend at least to be proceeding with one's great work on Secret Knowledge, then one can always say when it never comes out that the title explains the deficiency.

He felt rather like someone lying in a bath after all the water has run out, witless, almost dead.

Every man must ceaselessly struggle upwards. What was life but a warfare and a stranger's sojourn?

All of them, you see, misfits, all good for nothing, cowards, baboons, meek wolves, parasites, every man jack of them, people afraid to face their own responsibilities, fight their own fight, ready to go anywhere, as Tolstoy well perceived—

Never think that by releasing me you will be free. You would only condemn us to an ultimate hell on earth. You would only free something else to destroy us both.

Bent double, groaning with the weight, an old lame Indian was carrying on his back, by means of a strap looped over his forehead, another poor Indian, yet older and more decrepit than himself. He carried the older man and his crutches, trembling in every limb under this weight of the past, he carried both their burdens.

Under the volcano! It was not for nothing the ancients had placed Tartarus under Mt. Aetna, nor within it, the monster Typhoeus, with his hundred heads and—relatively—fearful eyes and voices.

Even almost bad poetry is better than life

The Consul looked at the sun. But he had lost the sun: it was not his sun. Like the truth, it was well-nigh impossible to face; he did not want to go anywhere near it, least of all, sit in its light, facing it.

Nothing is altered and in spite of God's mercy I am still alone. Though my suffering seems senseless I am still in agony. There is no explanation of my life." Indeed there was not, nor was this what he'd meant to convey.

The dead. Do they sleep? Why should they, when we cannot?