Top 35 Malcolm Lowry Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The howling pariah dogs, the cocks that herald dawn all night, the drumming, the moaning that will be found later white plumage huddled on telegraph wires in back gardens or fowl roosting in apple trees, the eternal sorrow that never sleeps of great Mexico.”

— Malcolm Lowry

2. “No, my secrets are of the grave and must be kept. And this is how I sometimes think of myself, as a great explorer who has discovered some extraordinary land from which he can never return to give his knowledge to the world: but the name of this land is hell.”

— Malcolm Lowry

3. “No se puede vivir sin amar.”

— Malcolm Lowry

4. “Good God, if our civilization were to sober up for a couple of days it’d die of remorse on the third.”

— Malcolm Lowry

5. “What I have absolutely no sympathy with is the legislator, the man who seeks, for his own profit, to exploit the weaknesses of those who are unable to help themselves and then to fasten some moral superscription upon it. This I loathe so much that I cannot conceivably explain how much it is.”

— Malcolm Lowry

6. “Why am I here, says the silence, what have I done, echoes the emptiness, why have I ruined myself in this wilful manner, chuckles the money in the till, why have I been brought so low, wheedles the thoroughfare, to which the only answer was – The square gave him no answer.”

— Malcolm Lowry

7. “British Columbia, the genteel Siberia, that was neither genteel nor a Siberia, but an undiscovered, perhaps an undiscoverable Paradise.”

— Malcolm Lowry

8. “The dead. Do they sleep? Why should they, when we cannot?”

— Malcolm Lowry

9. “Night: and once again, the nightly grapple with death, the room shaking with daemonic orchestras, the snatches of fearful sleep, the voices outside the window, my name being continually repeated with scorn by imaginary parties arriving, the dark’s spinets. As if there were not enough real noises in these nights the color of grey hair. Not like the rending tumult of American cities, the noise of the unbandaging of great giants in agony.”

— Malcolm Lowry

10. “How, unless you drink as I do, could you hope to understand the beauty of an old Indian woman playing dominoes with a chicken?”

— Malcolm Lowry

11. “Fear ringed by doubt is my eternal moon.”

— Malcolm Lowry

12. “What is man but a little soul holding up a corpse?”

— Malcolm Lowry

13. “How alike are the groans of love to those of the dying.”

— Malcolm Lowry

14. “Black Flowers is the name of that song.” Cervantes was about to beckon the man to come in. “It say: – I suffer, because your lips say only lies and they have death in a kiss.”

— Malcolm Lowry

15. “Under the volcano! It was not for nothing the ancients had placed Tartarus under Mt. Aetna, nor within it, the monster Typhoeus, with his hundred heads and – relatively – fearful eyes and voices.”

— Malcolm Lowry

16. “Only against death does man cry out in vain.”

— Malcolm Lowry

17. “Muzzle a dog and he will bark out of the other end.”

— Malcolm Lowry

18. “The Consul felt a pang. Ah, to have a horse, and gallop away, singing, to someone you loved perhaps, into the heart of all the simplicity and peace in the world; was that not like the opportunity afforded man by life itself? Of course not. Still, just for a moment, it had seemed that it was.”

— Malcolm Lowry

19. “How shall the murdered man convince his assassin he will not haunt him.”

— Malcolm Lowry

20. “Never think that by releasing me you will be free. You would only condemn us to an ultimate hell on earth. You would only free something else to destroy us both.”

— Malcolm Lowry

21. “Hugh put one foot up on the parapet and regarded his cigarette that seemed bent, like humanity, on consuming itself as quickly as possible.”

— Malcolm Lowry

22. “Bent double, groaning with the weight, an old lame Indian was carrying on his back, by means of a strap looped over his forehead, another poor Indian, yet older and more decrepit than himself. He carried the older man and his crutches, trembling in every limb under this weight of the past, he carried both their burdens.”

— Malcolm Lowry

23. “The Consul looked at the sun. But he had lost the sun: it was not his sun. Like the truth, it was well-nigh impossible to face; he did not want to go anywhere near it, least of all, sit in its light, facing it.”

— Malcolm Lowry

24. “SCARED TO DEATH In Arizona, a 1000-acre forest of junipers suddenly withered and died. Foresters are unable to explain it, but the Indians say the trees died of fear but they are not in agreement as to what caused the fright.”

— Malcolm Lowry

25. “I like prefaces. I read them. Sometimes I do not read any further.”

— Malcolm Lowry

26. “Even almost bad poetry is better than life.”

— Malcolm Lowry

27. “Far above him a few white clouds were racing windily after a pale gibbous moon. Drink all morning, they said to him, drink all day. This is life!”

— Malcolm Lowry

28. “Love is the only thing which gives meaning to our poor ways on earth.”

— Malcolm Lowry

29. “The will of man is unconquerable. Even God cannot conquer it.”

— Malcolm Lowry

30. “There was no mistaking, even in the uncertain light, the hand, half crabbed, half generous, and wholly drunken, of the Consul himself, the Greek e’s, the flying buttresses of d’s, the t’s like lonely wayside crosses save where they crucified an entire word.”

— Malcolm Lowry

31. “Interchangeable ever were the terms of abuse with which the aggressor discredits those about to be ravaged!”

— Malcolm Lowry

32. “For a time they confronted each other like two mute unspeaking forts.”

— Malcolm Lowry

33. “The movements of some more little red birds in the garden, like animated rosebuds, appeared unbearably jittery and thievish. It was as though the creatures were attached by sensitive wires to his nerves.”

— Malcolm Lowry

34. “Perhaps his tragedy is that he is the only normal writer left on earth – and it is this that adds to his isolation and so too his so sense of guilt.”

— Malcolm Lowry

35. “In the war to come correspondents would assume unheard of importance, plunging through flame to feed the public its little gobbets of dehydrated excrement.”

— Malcolm Lowry

36. “I have resisted temptation for two and a half minutes at least: my redemption is sure.”

— Malcolm Lowry

37. “Ah, guilt and sorrow had dogged Juan’s footsteps too, for he was not a Catholic who could rise refreshed from the cold bath of confession. Yet the banality stood: that the past was irrevocably past. And conscience had been given man to regret it only in so far as that might change the future. For man, every man, Juan seemed to be telling him, even as Mexico, must ceaselessly struggle upward. What was life but a warfare and a stranger’s sojourn?”

— Malcolm Lowry

38. “Indeed, on the face of it, this man of abnormal strength and constitution and obscure ambition, whom Hugh would never know, could never deliver nor make agreement to God for, but in his way loved and desired to help, had triumphantly succeeded in pulling himself together.”

— Malcolm Lowry