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Top Paul Bowles Quotes

Browse top 66 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Paul Bowles.

Favorite Paul Bowles Quotes

1. "Often when he was not working he had come here and sat an entire afternoon, lulled by the din and music from the other rooms into a state of vague ecstasy, while he contemplated the small sheet of water outside the window. It was that happy frame of mind into which his people could project themselves so easily - the mere absence of immediate unpleasant preoccupation could start it off, and a landscape which included the sea, a river, a fountain, or anything that occupied the eye without engaging the mind, was of use in sustaining it. It was the world behind the world, where reflection precludes the necessity for action, and the calm which all things seek in death appears briefly in the guise of contentment, the spirit at last persuaded that the still waters of perfection are reachable." ~ Paul Bowles
2. "The sky hides the night behind it, and shelters the people beneath from the horror that lies above." ~ Paul Bowles
3. "...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." ~ Paul Bowles
4. "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 ..." ~ Paul Bowles
5. "Writing is harmless, and it keeps me in dinners and out of trouble." ~ Paul Bowles
6. "The bar was stuffy and melancholy. It was full of the sadness inherent in all deracinated things." ~ Paul Bowles
7. "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." ~ Paul Bowles
8. "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." ~ Paul Bowles
9. "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." ~ Paul Bowles
10. "Tangier is a one-horse town that happens to have its own government." ~ Paul Bowles
11. "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." ~ Paul Bowles
12. "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." ~ Paul Bowles
13. "... 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." ~ Paul Bowles
14. "PoemThings will go on like this forEver. NoThing shall shatter. NoTree. NoBlade of grass shall beThere. NoThing butBlue rocks shallFill the valley where ISleep.Things shall go on like this forEver.Things shall be unBroken.No action shall shatter. NoThing shall escape and noBody shall shatter ideas and noBeing shall shatter. NoTree. NoBlade of grass shallBe present toWitness theIncident.********Everything shall be always thus. NoThing shall be turned or moved.Touched.All shall forever be so." ~ Paul Bowles
15. "Scene VI (1940)It is our fault we love only the skull of BeautyWithout knowing who she was, of what she died.We have the thief's guilt, but not his booty,The liar's spasm without ever having lied.The sick locust scrapes his injured song,His thorax only partially destroyed.Retching is prohibited. It's wrong.The murderer feels no hate he can avoid.Now flies bite worst where the skin is broken.Illness triumphs. Lesions. Soon tumors sprout.The bloated plants quiver, the seeds will be shaken.'Your head's bashed in, darling. Look out." ~ Paul Bowles
16. "If she could only give up, relax, and live in the perfect knowledge that there was no hope." ~ Paul Bowles
17. "Before I was twenty, I mean, I used to think that life was a thing that kept gaining impetus. It would get richer and deeper each year. You kept learning more, getting wiser, having more insight, going further into the truth—" She hesitated. Port laughed abruptly. "And now you know it's not like that. Right? It's more like smoking a cigarette. The first few puffs it tastes wonderful, and you don't even think of its ever being used up. Then you begin taking it for granted. Suddenly you realize it's nearly burned down to the end. And then's when you're conscious of the bitter taste." "But I'm always conscious of the unpleasant taste and of the end approaching," she said." ~ Paul Bowles
18. "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." ~ Paul Bowles
19. "If you could not have freedom you could still have vengeance." ~ Paul Bowles
20. "...before there can be change there must be discontent." ~ Paul Bowles
21. "In the school they teach you what the world means, and once you have learned, you will always know," Amar's father had told him."But suppose the world changes?" Amar had thought. "Then what would you know?" ~ Paul Bowles
22. "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. Indeed, he would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was he had felt most at home." ~ Paul Bowles
23. "When I was young" … "Before I was twenty, I mean, I used to think that life was a thing that kept gaining impetus, it would get richer and deeper each year. You kept learning more, getting wiser, having more insight, going further into the truth" – she hesitated.Port laughed abruptly. – "And now you know it's not like that. Right? It's more like smoking a cigarette. The first few puffs it tasted wonderful, and you don't even think of its ever being used up. Then you begin taking it for granted. Suddenly you realize it's nearly burned down to the end. And then's when you're conscious of the bitter taste." ~ Paul Bowles
24. "Fiction should always steer clear of political considerations." ~ Paul Bowles
25. "Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless." ~ Paul Bowles
26. "Security is a false God. Begin to make sacrifices to it and you are lost." ~ Paul Bowles
27. "There is a way to master silenceControl its curves, inhabit its dark cornersAnd listen to the hiss of time outside" ~ Paul Bowles
28. "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." ~ Paul Bowles
29. "Illness reduces man to his basic state: a cloaca in which the chemical processes continue. The meaningless hegemony of the involuntary." ~ Paul Bowles
30. "How many times his (Port's) friends, envying him his life, had said to him: "Your life is so simple." "Your life seems always to go in a straight line." Whenever they had said the words he heard in them an implicit reproach: it is not difficult to build a straight road on a treeless plain. He felt that what they really meant to say was: "You have chosen the easiest terrain." But if they elected to place obstacles in their own way-which they clearly did, encumbering themselves with every sort of unnecessary allegiance-that was no reason why they should object to his having simplified his life. So it was with a certain annoyance that he would say: "Everyone makes the life he wants. Right?" as though there were nothing further to be said." ~ Paul Bowles
31. "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." ~ Paul Bowles
32. "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." ~ Paul Bowles
33. "A black star appears, a point of darkness in the night sky's clarity. Point of darkness and gateway to repose. Reach out, pierce the fine fabric of the sheltering sky, take repose." ~ Paul Bowles
34. "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 . . . [from] nothing, I suppose. Just darkness. Absolute night." ~ Paul Bowles
35. "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." ~ Paul Bowles
36. "How peaceful it was, with the light evening breeze stirring the small leaves of the grapevine that clustered around the electric bulb, making the shadows move and change on the yellow mat below. For a moment he pushed aside the thought of money. From time to time the dark water beside them rippled audibly, as if a tiny fish had come to the surface for an instant and then darted beneath. It was in peaceful moments such as this, his father had said, that men were given to know just a little of what paradise was like, so that they might yearn for it with all their soul,and strive during their time on earth to be worthy of going there." ~ Paul Bowles
37. "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." ~ Paul Bowles
38. "The desert landscape is always at its best in the half-light of dawn or dusk. The sense of distance lacks: a ridge nearby can be a far-off mountain range, each small detail can take on the importance of a major variant on the countryside's repetitious theme. The coming of day promises a change; it is only when the day had fully arrived that the watcher suspects it is the same day returned once again--the same day he has been living for a long time, over and over, still blindingly bright and untarnished by time." ~ Paul Bowles
39. "That was what he wanted, to be baked dry and hard, to feel the vaporous worries evaporating one by one, to know finally that all the damp little doubts and hesitations that covered the floor of his being were curling up and expiring in the great furnace-blast of the sun." ~ Paul Bowles
40. "After all, the English are really too much. One can't live in that constipated fashion forever." ~ Paul Bowles
41. "These empty days. How do you spend them?" ~ Paul Bowles
42. "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." ~ Paul Bowles
43. "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." ~ Paul Bowles
44. "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." ~ Paul Bowles
45. "...a man could scarcely make his writing a reason for living unless he believed in the validity of that writing." ~ Paul Bowles
46. "In reality the gatherings were held in order to entertain these few Moslem guests, to whom the unaccountable behavior of Europeans never ceased to be a fascinating spectacle. Most of the Europeans, of course, thought the Moslem gentlemen were invited to add local color." ~ Paul Bowles
47. "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." ~ Paul Bowles
48. "Not all the ravages caused by our merciless age are tangible ones. The subtler forms of destruction, those involving only the human spirit, are the most to be dreaded." ~ Paul Bowles
49. "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." ~ Paul Bowles
50. "...It is far more sinful to pray irregularly than not to pray at all." ~ Paul Bowles
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And as long as you're subject to birth and death, you'll never attain enlightenment."
Author: Bodhidharma

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Thin
Con
Here
Hen
Ear
She
Thou
Wit
Ally
Per
Each
Ten
Less
Ways
Ring
Use
Tan
Mean
Lit
Though
King
Side
Sit
Hang
Act
Hey
Lie
Once
Said
Able
Ought
Seem
Place
Era
Moment
Ape
End
Win
Pen
Behind
Having
Another
Sky
Tea
Deep
Son
Bee
Word
Early
Wing

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