Quotes from Paul Bowles

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Security is a false god; begin making sacrifices to it and you are lost.

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.

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

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

before there can be change there must be discontent.

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.

Sunset is such a sad hour," she said, presently. "If I watch the end of a day—any day—I always feel it's the end of a whole epoch. And the autumn! It might as well be the end of everything," he said. "That's why I hate cold countries, and love the warm ones, where there's no winter, and when night comes you feel an opening up of the life there, instead of a closing down. Don't you feel that?

He did not think of himself as a tourist; he was a traveler. The difference is partly one of time, he would explain. Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another.

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?

He did not look up because he knew how senseless the landscape would appear. It takes energy to invest life with meaning, and at present this energy was lacking. He knew how things could stand bare, their essence having retreated on all sides to beyond the horizon, as if impelled by a sinister centrifugal force.

Death is always on its way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life....we get to think of life as an inexhaustable well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times...How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet is all seems limitless.

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.

Many days later another caravan was passing and a man saw something on top of the highest dune there. And when they went up to see, they found Outka, Mimouna and Aicha; they were still there, lying the same way as when they had gone to sleep. And all three of the glasses,' he held up his own little tea glass, 'were full of sand. That was how they had their tea in the Sahara.

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

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

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

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