Quotes from Paul Bowles

The Hindus are busy letting themselves be seen riding in Cadillacs instead of smearing themselves with sandalwood paste and bowing in front of Ganpati. The Moslems would rather miss evening prayer than the new Disney movie. The Buddhists think it's more important to take over in the name of Stalin and Progress than to meditate on the four basic sorrows. And we don't even have to mention Christianity or Judaism.

You know, everyone here's got some little peccadillo he's hoping to hide.

But there was never any knowing or any certitude; the time to come always had more than one possible direction.

Our civilization is doomed to a short life: its component parts are too heterogeneous. I personally am content to see everything in the process of decay. The bigger the bombs, the quicker it will be done. The world is visually too hideous for one to make the attempt to preserve it. Let it go.

he refused to consider the Moroccans' present culture, however decadent, an established fact, an existing thing. Instead, he seemed to believe that it was something accidentally left over from bygone centuries, now in a necessary state of transition, that the people needed temporary guidance in order to progress to some better condition.

The key question, it seemed to him, was that of whether man was to obey Nature, or attempt to command her.

But don't we all like to be overpowered, one time or another.

He still felt coreless - he was no one, and he was standing here in the middle of no country. The place was counterfeit, a waiting room between connections, a transition from one way of being to another, which for the moment was neither way, no way.

At least you can say you were in on the last days of Morocco, he told her. How's your tea? Finished? I think we ought to be going.

Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really.

Even the smallest measure of time is greater than the greatest measure of space. Or is that a lie? Does it only seem so to us, because we can never get it back?

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.

the Istiqlal was powerful, which did not at all coincide with his conception of it, nor with the picture the organization painted of itself: a purely defensive group of selfless martyrs who were willing to brave the brutality of the French in order to bring hope to their suffering countrymen.

how could any young man merely sit back and wait for divine justice to take its course? It was asking the impossible.

There could be nothing, he reflected, to equal a government which was simply the honest enforcement, by means of the sword, of the laws of Islam.

If Moroccans are dying in Indo-China, if it rains too much or not enough, if there is no work, if one's wife is sick and penicillin is expensive, or if the French are still in Morocco, it is all the fault of America. She could change everything if she chose, but she does nothing because she does not love the Moslems.

That was one of the troubles with the Istiqlal, with all politics: you talked about people as though they were not really people, as though they were only things, numbers, animals, perhaps, but not really people.

It is far more sinful to pray irregularly than not to pray at all.

Ogniqualvolta si trovava in viaggio da un luogo all'altro, era in grado di valutare la propria vita con un po' più di obiettività del solito. Spesso, proprio durante un viaggio i suoi pensieri divenivano particolarmente lucidi, e prendeva decisioni cui non poteva arrivare quand'era fermo in un luogo.

It seems to me that if one could accept existence as it is, partake of it fully, the world could be magical. The cricket on my balcony at the moment piercing the night repeatedly with its hurried needle of sound, would be welcome merely because it is there, rather than an annoyance because it distracts me from what I am trying to do.

When they had gone the Moungari fell silent, to wait through the cold hours for the sun that would bring first warmth, then heat, thirst, fire, visions. The next night he did not know where he was, did not feel the cold. The wind blew dust along the ground into his mouth as he sang.

Men were looking at her, but with neither sympathy nor antipathy. Nor even with curiosity, she thought. They had the absorbed and vacant expression of the man who looks into his handkerchief after blowing his nose.

Before her eyes was the violent blue sky— nothing else. For an endless moment she looked into it. Like a great overpowering sound it destroyed everything in her mind, paralyzed her. Someone once had said to her that the sky hides the night behind it, shelters the person beneath from the horror that lies above. Unblinking, she fixed the solid emptiness, and the anguish began to move in her. At any moment the rip can occur, the edges fly back, and the giant maw will be revealed.

Only then did he understand that he really wanted to know nothing about El Ga'a beyond the fact that it was isolated and unfrequented, that it was precisely those things he had been trying to ascertain about it.