Paul Bowles Quotes

The odious little dogs that French people seemed to like so much rushed out at him as he rode by, barking furiously.

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.

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

"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.

La humanidad es todos salvo uno mismo.
Entonces, ¿Qué interés puede tener para nadie?

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?

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.

I have the feeling you are primarily two people,one of which should be killed.

The key question, it seemed to him, was that of whether man was to obey Nature, or attempt to command her. It had been answered long, long ago, claimed Moss; man's very essence lay in the fact that he had elected to command. But to Stenham that seemed a shallow reply. To him wisdom consisted in the conscious and joyous obedience to natural laws, yet when he had said that to Moss, Moss had laughed pityingly. 'My dear man, wisdom is a primitive concept,' he had told him. 'What we want now is knowledge.' Only great disillusionment could make a man say such a thing, Stenham believed.

...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.

"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.

"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?"

There's something repulsive about an American without money in his pocket.

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.

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.