Quotes from Malcolm Lowry

But there was no mistaking, even in the uncertain light, the hand, half crabbed, half generous, and wholly drunken, of the Consul himself, the Greek e's, flying buttresses of d's, the t's like lonely wayside crosses save where they crucified an entire word, the words themselves slanting steeply downhill, though the individual characters seemed as if resisting the descent, braced, climbing the other way.

What is man but a little soul holding up a corpse?

Not that it was not a nightmare. It was, but of a very special kind he was scarcely old enough to appreciate.

Why am I here, says the silence, what have I done, echoes the emptiness, why have I ruined myself in this wilful manner, chuckles the money in the till, why have I been brought so low, wheedles the thoroughfare, to which the only answer was—The square gave him no answer.

Night: and once again, the nightly grapple with death, the room shaking with daemonic orchestras, the snatches of fearful sleep, the voices outside the window, my name being continually repeated with scorn by imaginary parties arriving, the dark's spinets. As if there were not enough real noises in these nights the color of grey hair. Not like the rending tumult of American cities, the noise of the unbandaging of great giants in agony.

Their house was dying, only an agony went there now. And leaving the burning dream Yvonne felt herself suddenly gathered upwards and borne towards the stars, through eddies of stars scattering aloft with ever wider circlings like rings on water, among which now appeared, like a flock of diamond birds flying softly and steadily towards Orion, the Pleiades …

Chi ha respirato la polvere delle strade del Messico, non troverà più pace in nessun altro paese.

I am the chief steward of my fate, I am the fireman of my soul.

The slow darkening of the murals as you look from right to left. It seems somehow to symbolise the gradual imposition of the Spaniards' conquering will upon the Indians. Do you see what I mean?

The broken pink pillars, in the half-light, might have been waiting to fall down on him: the pool, covered with green scum, its steps torn away and hanging by one rotting clamp, to close over his head. The shattered evil-smelling chapel, overgrown with weeds, the crumbling walls, splashed with urine, on which scorpions lurked - wrecked entablature, sad archivolt, slippery stones covered with excreta - this place, where love had once brooded, seemed part of a nightmare.

And in the town too were innumerable white cantinhas, where one could drink forever on credit, with the door open and the wind blowing.

SCARED TO DEATH In Arizona, a 1000-acre forest of junipers suddenly withered and died. Foresters are unable to explain it, but the Indians say the trees died of fear but they are not in agreement as to what caused the fright.

British Columbia, the genteel Siberia, that was neither genteel nor a Siberia, but an undiscovered, perhaps an undiscoverable Paradise

Black Flowers is the name of that song." Cervantes was about to beckon the man to come in. "It say:—I suffer, because your lips say only lies and they have death in a kiss.

not holding hands, but with their hands just meeting, as though not quite sure they weren't dreaming this, each of them separately on their far bereaved cots, their hands but blown fragments of their memories, half afraid to commingle, yet touching over the howling sea at night.

It was this calamity he now, with María, penetrated, the only thing alive in him now this burning boiling crucified evil organ—God is it possible to suffer more than this, out of this suffering something must be born, and what would be born was his own death) for ah, how alike are the groans of love to those of the dying, how alike, those of love, to those of the dying.

Indeed, on the face of it, this man of abnormal strength and constitution and obscure ambition, whom Hugh would never know, could never deliver nor make agreement to God for, but in his way loved and desired to help, had triumphantly succeeded in pulling himself together.

Suddenly he screamed, and it was as though this scream were being tossed from one tree to another, as its echoes returned, then, as though the trees themselves were crowding nearer, huddled together, closing over him, pitying …

Far too soon it had begun to seem too much of a triumph, it had been too good, too horribly unimaginable to lose, impossible finally to bear: it was as if it had become itself its own foreboding that it could not last, a foreboding that was like a presence too, turning his steps towards the taverns again. And how could one begin all over again, as though the Café Chagrin, the Farolito, had never been?

Le gusta este jardín, que es suyo? ¡Evite que sus hijos lo destruyan!

Quauhnahuac was like the times in this respect, wherever you turned the abyss was waiting for you round the corner.

But who could agree with someone who was so certain you were going to be sober the day after to-morrow?

The Consul, an inconceivable anguish of horripilating hangover thunderclapping about his skull, and accompanied by a protective screen of demons gnattering in his ears, became aware that in the horrid event of his being observed by his neighbours it could hardly be supposed he was just sauntering down his garden with some innocent horticultural object in view.

Th soul! Ah, and did she not too have her savage and traitorous Tlaxcalans, her Cortés and her noches tristes, and, sitting within her innermost citadel in chains, drinking chocolate, her pale Moctezuma?