Quotes from Malcolm Lowry

Fitzgerald's] latter work represents essentially best qualities of chivalry and decency now too often lacking in the English themselves.

For the Love of Dying The tortures of hell are stern, their fires burn fiercely. Yet vultures turn against the air more beautifully than seagulls float downwind in cool sunlight, or fans in asylums spin a loom of fate for hope which never ventured up so high as life's deception, astride the vulture's flight. If death can fly, just for the love of flying, what might not life do, for the love of dying?

Strange Type I wrote: in the dark cavern of our birth. The printer had it tavern, which seems better: But herein lies the subject of our mirth, Since on the next page death appears as dearth. So it may be that God's word was distraction, Which to our strange type appears destruction, Which is bitter.

kako se, osim ako piješ kao ja, možeš nadati da ?eš pojmiti lepotu jedne starice iz Taraska koja u sedam sati ujutru igra domine?

It was just possible too of course that he might meet— But suddenly the Calle Nicaragua rose up to meet him. The Consul lay face downward on the deserted street.

For myself I like to take my sorrow into the shadow of old monasteries, my guilt into cloisters and under tapestries, and into the misericordes of unimaginable cantinas where sad-faced potters and legless beggars drink at dawn…

You can't see them, but it's chock full of defunct newspapermen, still spying through keyholes and persuading themselves they're acting in the best interests of democracy.

Not all were in pairs however, the Consul noted. A few lone females on the upgrade were sheltered by angels only. It seemed to him these females were casting half-jealous glances downward after their plummeting husbands, some of whose faces betrayed the most unmistakable relief.

The Consul stood up. He gave two short whistles while below him the cat's ears twirled. "She thinks I'm a tree with a bird in it," he added.

Madness suddenly ceases to be a refuge and becomes incarnate in the shattering sky and all his surroundings in the presence of which reason, already struck dumb, can only bow the head. Does the madman find solace at such moments, as his thoughts like cannonballs crash through his brain, in the exquisite beauty of the madhouse garden?

the fair had completely altered for him. The merry grinding of the roller skates, the cheerful if ironic music, the cries of the little children on their goose-necked steeds, the procession of queer pictures—all this had suddenly become transcendentally awful and tragic, distant, transmuted, as it were some final impression on the senses of what the earth was like, carried over into an obscure region of death, a gathering thunder of immedicable sorrow.

Remember Oaxaca? The word was like a breaking heart, a sudden peal of stifled bells in a gale, the last syllables of one dying of thirst in the desert.

Yet they had loved one another! But it was as though their love were wandering over some desolate cactus plain, far from here, lost, stumbling and falling, attacked by wild beasts, calling for help—dying, to sigh at last, with a kind of weary peace: Oaxaca.

A starving pariah dog with the appearance of having lately been skinned had squeezed itself in after the last man; it looked up at the Consul with beady, gentle eyes. Then, thrusting down its poor wrecked dinghy of a chest, from which raw withered breasts drooped, it began to bow and scrape before him.

the whip-poor-will, like love and wisdom, had no home

And here indeed it was again, the temptation, the cowardly, the future-corruptive serpent: trample on it stupid fool. Be Mexico.

At first he saw only the shapely legs of the girl who was leading him, now by the constricted power of aching flesh alone, of pathetic trembling yet brutal lust, through the little glass-paned rooms, that grew smaller and smaller, darker and darker,...

Her body was Yvonne's too, her legs, her breasts, her pounding passionate heart, electricity crackled under his fingers running over her, though the sentimental illusion was going, it was sinking into a sea, as though it had not been there, it had become the sea, a desolate horizon with one huge black sailing ship, hull down, sweeping into the sunset; or her body was nothing, an abstraction merely, a calamity, a fiendish apparatus for calamitous sickening sensation; it was disaster.

First, Spaniard exploits Indian, then, when he had children, he exploited the half-breed, then the pure-blooded Mexican Spaniard, the criollo, then the mestizo exploits everybody, foreigners, Indians, and all. Then the Germans and Americans exploited him: now the final chapter, the exploitation of everybody by everybody else –

His mind was clear. Physically he seemed better too. It was as if, out of an ultimate contamination he had derived strength. He felt free to devour what remained of his life in peace.

He was aware of a desire at once for complete glutted oblivion and for an innocent youthful fling. "Alas," a voice seemed to be saying also in his ear, "my poor little child, you do not feel any of these things really, only lost, only homeless.

Who knows why man, however beset his chance by lies, has been offered love? Yet it had to be faced, down, down he had gone, down till—it was not the bottom even now, he realised. It was not the end quite yet. It was as if his fall had been broken by a narrow ledge, a ledge from which he could neither climb up nor down, on which he lay bloody and half stunned, while far below him the abyss yawned, waiting. And on it as he lay he was surrounded in delirium by these phantoms of himself.

You can´t live without loving.

Scorpio, setting . . . Sagittarius, Capricornus; ah, there, here they were, after all, in their right places, their configurations all at once right, recognised, their pure geometry scintillating, flawless. And to-night as five thousand years ago they would rise and set: Capricorn, Aquarius, with, beneath, lonely Fomalhaut; Pisces; and the Ram; Taurus, with Aldebaran and the Pleiades.