Quotes from Paul Bowles

Although I knew enough Freud to believe that the sex urge was an important mainspring of life, it still seemed to me that any conscious manifestation of sex was necessarily ludicrous. Defecation and copulation were two activities which made a human being totally ridiculous. At least the former could be conducted in private, but the latter by definition demanded a partner. I discovered, though, that whenever I ventured this opinion, people took it as a joke.

If she could only give up, relax, and live in the perfect knowledge that there was no hope.

And yet always you feel as though you understood perfectly the people and why they do everything as they do.Still you are absolutely severed from them.

Here we say that life is a cliff, and you must never turn around and look back when you're climbing.

The Americans are the nature of the future, she would announce in her hearty voice. Here's to 'em. God bless their gadgets, great and small, God bless Frigidaire, Tampax and Coca-Cola. Yes, even Coca-Cola,darling. (It was generally conceded that Coca-Cola's advertising was ruining the picturesqueness of Morocco.)

You want us all to be snake-charmers and scorpion-eaters, he raged, at one point in their conversation ... Naturally, Eunice replied in her most provoking manner. It would be far preferable to being a nation of tenth-rate pseudo-civilized rug-sellers.

You can't discipline the whole country. Still, Moss said dreamily, that's what must be done before they can ever accomplish anything.

a man could scarcely make his writing a reason for living unless he believed in the validity of that writing.

Everything's explained by the constant intervention of Allah. And whatever happens had to happen, and was decreed at the beginning of time, and there's no way of even imagining how anything could have been different from what it is.

He knew it was necessary to drive the French out, but he had always imagined that this would be done gloriously, with thousands of men on horseback flashing their swords and calling upon Allah to aid them in their holy mission ... It was hard to see any connection between the splendid war of liberation and all this whispering and frowning.

May Allah bless you. Or had she said: May Allah burn you? He was not sure which: the two Arabic words sounded so much alike.

The wind blew the dust along the ground into his mouth as he sang.

nothing would have meaning, because the knowing was itself the meaning; beyond that there was nothing to know.

These empty days. How do you spend them?

One can only worry so much, however; then one becomes philosophical. I suppose philosophy is merely sublimated worry.

his behavior there was a perfect balance between gentleness and violence that gave her particular delight.

Another important difference between tourist and traveler is that the former accepts his own civilization without question; not so the traveler, who compares it with the others, and rejects those elements he finds not to this liking.

It was one of the charms of the International Zone that you could get anything you wanted if you paid for it. Do anything, too, for that matter; - there were no incorruptibles. It was only a question of price.

Still, he could not think of the mass of Moroccans without contempt. He had no patience with their ignorance and backwardness; if he damned the Europeans with one breath, he was bound to damn the Moroccans with the next. No one escaped but him, and that was because he hated himself most of all.

What a wonderful thing to be an American! he said impetuously. Yes, said Dyar automatically, never having given much thought to what it would be like not to be an American. It seemed somehow the natural thing to be.

Since Thami had the Arab's utter incomprehension of the meaning of pornography, he imagined that the police had placed the ban on obscene films because these infringed upon Christian doctrine at certain specific points, in which case any Christian might be expected to show interest, if only to disapprove.

The rest of the world was there for her to take at any moment she wished it, but she always rejected it in favour of her own familiar little cosmos.

You know, said Port, and his voice sounded unreal, as voices are likely to do after a long pause in an utterly silent spot, the sky here's very strange. I often have the sensation when I look at it that it's a solid thing up there, protecting us from what's behind. Kit shuddered slightly as she said: From behind? Yes. But what is behind? Her voice was very small. Nothing, I suppose. Just darkness. Absolute night.

Tangier is a one-horse town that happens to have its own government.