Paul Bowles

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

— Paul Bowles

“Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from…

— Paul Bowles

“The desert landscape is always at its best in the half-light of dawn or dusk. The sense of distance lacks: a ridge…

— Paul Bowles

How fragile we are under the sheltering sky. Behind the sheltering sky is a vast dark universe, and we're just so small.

— Paul Bowles

“The difference was principally in the invisible places toward which their respective hearts were turned. They dreamed of Cairo with its autonomous…

— Paul Bowles

“And it occurred to him that a walk through the countryside was a sort of epitome of the passage through life itself.…

— Paul Bowles

“...Amar was made conscious in an instant of a presence in the air, something which had been there all the time, but…

— Paul Bowles

“Before I was twenty, I mean, I used to think that life was a thing that kept gaining impetus. It would get…

— Paul Bowles

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

— Paul Bowles

“We get to think of life as an inexhaustible well…How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty.…

— Paul Bowles

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

— Paul Bowles

“Someone once had said to her that the sky hides the night behind it, shelters the person beneath from the horror that…

— Paul Bowles

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

— Paul Bowles

“Often when he was not working he had come here and sat an entire afternoon, lulled by the din and music from…

— Paul Bowles

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

— Paul Bowles

“Writing is harmless, and it keeps me in dinners and out of trouble.”

— Paul Bowles

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

— Paul Bowles

[A]nother important difference between tourist and traveler is that the former accepts his own civilization without question; not so the traveler, who…

— Paul Bowles

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

— Paul Bowles

“He did not think of himself as a tourist; he was a traveler. The difference is partly one of time, he would…

— Paul Bowles

“... the Istiqlal was powerful, which did not at all coincide with his conception of it, nor with the picture the organization…

— Paul Bowles

“After all, the English are really too much. One can't live in that constipated fashion forever.”

— Paul Bowles

“That was one of the troubles with the Istiqlal, with all politics: you talked about people as though they were not really…

— Paul Bowles

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

— Paul Bowles

“Our civilization is doomed to a short life: its component parts are too heterogeneous. I personally am content to see everything in…

— Paul Bowles