Quotes from Malcolm Lowry

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.

The more even sounds of the bus wove into Hugh's brain an idiotic syllogism: I am losing the Battle of the Ebro, I am also losing Yvonne, therefore Yvonne is...

I can see him and I hate the bastard already: short-sighted and promiscuous, six foot three of gristle and bristle and pathos, of deep-voiced charm and casuistry. . . Business-like, inept and unintelligent, strong and infantile, like most American men, quick to wield chairs in a fight, vain, and who, at thirty still ten, turns the act of love into a kind of dysentery...

Then this beggar with one leg leaned forward: he dropped a coin into the legless man's outstretched hand. There were tears in the first beggar's eyes.

This ought to be about the place, if Alcapancingo's over there, Hugh said, where Bernal Díaz and his Tlaxcalans got across to beat up Quauhnahuac. Superb name for a dance band: Bernal Díaz and his Tlaxcalans...Or didn't you get around to Prescott at the University of Hawaii?

And she knew nothing whatever of what all too recently he had gone through, his fall in the Calle Nicaragua, his aplomb, coolness, even bravery there—the Burke's Irish whiskey! What a world.

War is being declared tomorrow here so perhaps you can understand that I have been working under difficulties, but difficulties negligible compared with what others have to go through.

Fear ringed by doubt is my eternal moon.

I like prefaces. I read them. Sometimes I do not read any further.

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

Only against death does man cry out in vain.

How alike are the groans of love, to those of the dying.

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

the fallen leaves in the forest seemed to make even the ground glow and burn with light

No se puede vivir sin amar

I have no house only a shadow. But whenever you are in need of a shadow, my shadow is yours.

To say nothing of what you lose, lose, lose, are losing, man. You fool, you stupid fool ... You've even been insulated from the responsibility of genuine suffering ... Even the suffering you do endure is largely unnecessary. Actually spurious. It lacks the very basis you require of it for its tragic nature. You deceive yourself.

The Consul felt a pang. Ah, to have a horse, and gallop away, singing, to someone you loved perhaps, into the heart of all the simplicity and peace in the world; was that not like the opportunity afforded man by life itself? Of course not. Still, just for a moment, it had seemed that it was.

Try persuading the world not to cut its throat for half a decade or more...and it'll begin to dawn on you that even your behavior's part of its plan.

Adiós," she added in Spanish, "I have no house only a shadow. But whenever you are in need of a shadow, my shadow is yours." "Thank you." "Sank you." "Not sank you, Señora Gregorio, thank you." "Sank you.

Only against death does man cry out in vain.

Somebody threw a dead dog after him down the ravine.

He was safe here; this was the place he loved - sanctuary, the paradise of his despair.

Now you see what kind of creatures we are, Hugh. Eating things alive. That's what we do. How can you have much respect for mankind, or any belief in the social struggle?