Top 50 Paul Bowles Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “Security is a false God. Begin to make sacrifices to it and you are lost.”

— Paul Bowles

3. “Life is lived only once. And the less seriously the better.”

— Paul Bowles

4. “How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”

— Paul Bowles

5. “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.”

— Paul Bowles

6. “The only effort worth making is the one it takes to learn the geography of one’s own nature.”

— Paul Bowles

7. “The soul is the weariest part of the body.”

— Paul Bowles

8. “If you don’t know why you like a thing, it is usually worth your while to attempt to find out.”

— Paul Bowles

9. “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

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

— Paul Bowles

11. “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

12. “Because neither she nor Port had ever lived a life of any kind of regularity, they had both made the fatal error of coming hazily to regard time as non-existent. One year was like another year. Eventually everything would happen.”

— Paul Bowles

13. “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

14. “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.”

— Paul Bowles

15. “Before her eyes was the violent blue sky – nothing else. For an endless moment she looked into it. Like a great overpowering sound it destroyed everything in her mind, paralyzed her. 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

16. “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

17. “The sky hides the night behind it and shelters the people beneath from the horror that lies above.”

— Paul Bowles

18. “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

19. “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

20. “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

21. “If people and their manner of living were alike everywhere, there would not be much point in moving from one place to another.”

— Paul Bowles

22. “The only thing that makes life worth living is the possibility of experiencing now and then a perfect moment. And perhaps even more than that, it’s having the ability to recall such moments in their totality, to contemplate them like jewels.”

— Paul Bowles

23. “She was saved from prettiness by the intensity of her gaze.”

— Paul Bowles

24. “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.”

— Paul Bowles

25. “Sunset is such a sad hour,” she said, presently. “If I watch the end of a day – any day – I always feel it’s the end of a whole epoch. And the autumn! It might as well be the end of everything,” he said. “That’s why I hate cold countries, and love the warm ones, where there’s no winter, and when night comes you feel an opening up of the life there, instead of a closing down. Don’t you feel that?”

— Paul Bowles

26. “It was such places as this, such moments that he loved above all else in life; she knew that, and she also knew that he loved them more if she could be there to experience them with him. And although he was aware that the very silences and emptinesses that touched his soul terrified her, he could not bear to be reminded of that. It was as if always he held the fresh hope that she, too, would be touched in the same way as he by solitude and the proximity to infinite things.”

— Paul Bowles

27. “He did not look up because he knew how senseless the landscape would appear. It takes energy to invest life with meaning, and at present this energy was lacking. He knew how things could stand bare, their essence having retreated on all sides to beyond the horizon, as if impelled by a sinister centrifugal force.”

— Paul Bowles

28. “Even the smallest measure of time is greater than the greatest measure of space. Or is that a lie? Does it only seem so to us, because we can never get it back?”

— Paul Bowles

29. “Although this was not a comforting point of view, he did not reject it, because it coincided with one of his basic beliefs: that a man must at all costs keep some part of himself outside and beyond life. If he should ever for an instant cease doubting, accept wholly the truth of what his senses conveyed to him, he would be dislodged from the solid ground to which he clung and swept along with the current, having lost all objective sense, totally involved with existence.”

— Paul Bowles

30. “Illness reduces man to his basic state: a cloaca in which the chemical processes continue. The meaningless hegemony of the involuntary.”

— Paul Bowles

31. “Our civilization is doomed to a short life: its component parts are too heterogeneous. I personally am content to see everything in the process of decay. The bigger the bombs, the quicker it will be done. The world is visually too hideous for one to make the attempt to preserve it. Let it go.”

— Paul Bowles

32. “The act of living had been enjoyable; at some point when I was not paying attention, it had turned into a different sort of experience, to whose grimness I had grown so accustomed that I now took it for granted.”

— Paul Bowles

33. “Whenever he was en route from one place to another, he was able to look at his life with a little more objectivity than usual. it was often on trpis that he thought most clearly, and made the decisions that he could not reach when he was stationary.”

— Paul Bowles

34. “If you could not have freedom you could still have vengeance.”

— Paul Bowles

35. “And it occurred to him that a walk through the countryside was a sort of epitome of the passage through life itself. One never took the time to savor the details; one said: another day, but always with the hidden knowledge that each day was unique and final, that there never would be a return, another time.”

— Paul Bowles

36. “It’s very hard to write about that which is always beautiful and pleasant and good. You don’t get anywhere with it. There’s no friction in it. There’s no trouble. You have to have trouble. Somebody’s got to get in trouble, or no one wants to read it.”

— Paul Bowles

37. “It seems to me that if one could accept existence as it is, partake of it fully, the world could be magical. The cricket on my balcony at the moment piercing the night repeatedly with its hurried needle of sound, would be welcome merely because it is there, rather than an annoyance because it distracts me from what I am trying to do.”

— Paul Bowles

38. “No one can ever heap enough insults upon me to suit my taste. I think we all really thrive on hostility, because it’s the most intense kind of massage the ego can undergo. Other people’s indifference is the only horror.”

— Paul Bowles

39. “Here we say that life is a cliff, and you must never turn around and look back when you’re climbing.”

— Paul Bowles

40. “Frightfulness is never more than an unfamiliar pattern.”

— Paul Bowles

41. “Every second, ten stars set behind the black water in the west.”

— Paul Bowles

42. “He did not look up because he knew how senseless the landscape would appear. It takes energy to invest life with meaning, and at present this energy was lacking.”

— Paul Bowles

43. “The idea that at each successive moment he was deeper into the Sahara than he had been the moment before, that he was leaving behind all familiar things, this constant consideration kept him in a state of pleasurable agitation.”

— Paul Bowles

44. “Once one had seen her eyes, the rest of the face grew vague, and when one tried to recall her image afterwards, only the piercing, questioning violence of the wide eyes remained.”

— Paul Bowles

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

— Paul Bowles

46. “It is a dangerous discovery, because they are going to disregard many vital things in their haste to catch up.”

— Paul Bowles

47. “One can only worry so much, however; then one becomes philosophical. I suppose philosophy is merely sublimated worry.”

— Paul Bowles

48. “Publishers are thieves, they are on the other side of the barricade.”

— Paul Bowles

49. “But there was never any knowing or any certitude; the time to come always had more than one possible direction. One could not even give up hope. The wind would blow, the sand would settle, and in some as yet unforeseen manner time would bring about a change which could only be terrifying, since it would not be a continuation of the present.”

— Paul Bowles

50. “Tunner’s presence created a situation, however slight, which kept him from entering into the reflective state he considered essential.”

— Paul Bowles