Quotes by Paul Bowles, The Spider's House

“There are mornings when, from the first ray of light seized upon by the eye, and the first simple sounds that get inside the head, the heart is convinced that it is existing in rhythm to a kind of ...”

“Yes, but perhaps he did have something to do with it. (In such arguments Stenham often found himself unexpectedly extolling the bourgeois virtues.) If he was good himself, and worked hardNever! cri...”

“Stenham had always taken it for granted that the dichotomy of belief and behavior was the cornerstone of the Moslem world. It was too deep to be called hypocrisy; it was merely custom. They said on...”

“You know what politique is? It is the French word for a lie. Kdoub! Politique! When you hear the French say: our politique, you know they mean: our lies. And when you hear the Moslems, the Friends ...”

“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 ...”

“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...”

“That still did not invalidate their purity in his eyes, so long as they continued to live the way they lived: sitting on the floor, eating with their fingers, cooking and sleeping first in one room...”

“Decadence, decadence, he said to himself. Theyve lost everything and gained nothing. The French had merely daubed on the finishing touches at the end of a process which had begun five hundred years...”

“...It is far more sinful to pray irregularly than not to pray at all.”

“Fiction should always steer clear of political considerations.”

“Every little thing makes a difference, whether you decide it yourself or whether its pure accident. So many people have had the whole course of their lives changed by something perfectly simple lik...”

“...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 b...”

“...Amar was made conscious in an instant of a presence in the air, something which had been there all the time, but which he had never isolated and identified. The thing was in him, he was a part o...”

“You have to hate them, you mean? You cant decide: I will or I wont hate them?Amar did not completely understand. But I hate them now, he explained. The day Allah wants me to stop hating them, Hell ...”

“Having arrived at this point, he had found no direction in which to go save that of further withdrawal into a subjectivity which refused existence to any reality or law but its own. During these po...”

“nothing would have meaning, because the knowing was itself the meaning; beyond that there was nothing to know.”

“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...”

“There could be nothing, he reflected, to equal a government which was simply the honest enforcement, by means of the sword, of the laws of Islam.”

“There's a little war in progress here. There won't be anything left of the place if it goes on at this rate." (But it's hard to feign innocence if you've eaten the apple, he reflected.) "And it loo...”

“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.”