Paul Bowles Quotes.

1. "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. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four, five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps 20. And yet it all seems limitless."
- Quote by Paul Bowles

2. "I've always wanted to get as far as possible from the place where I was born. Far both geographically and spiritually. To leave it behind ... I feel that life is very short and the world is there to see and one should know as much about it as possible. One belongs to the whole world, not just one part of it."
- Quote by Paul Bowles

3. "Security is a false God. Begin to make sacrifices to it and you are lost."
- Quote by Paul Bowles

4. "The sky hides the night behind it and shelters the people beneath from the horror that lies above."
- Quote by Paul Bowles

5. "There is a way to master silence Control its curves, inhabit its dark corners And listen to the hiss of time outside"
- Quote by Paul Bowles

6. "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."
- Quote by Paul Bowles

7. "You will find yourself among people. There is no help for this nor should you want it otherwise. The passages where no one waits are dark and hard to navigate. The wet walls touch your shoulders on each side. When the trees were there I cared that they were there. And now they are gone, does it matter? The passages where no one waits go on and give no promise of an end. You will find yourself among people, Faces, clothing, teeth and hair and words, and many words When there was life, I said that life was wrong. What do I say now? You understand?"
- Quote by Paul Bowles

8. "We get to think of life as an inexhaustible well…How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."
- Quote by Paul Bowles

9. "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."
- Quote by Paul Bowles

10. "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."
- Quote by Paul Bowles