The Sheltering Sky

by Paul Bowles

it is not always easy to support the stares of hungry people.

if any American can truthfully accept a definition of life which makes it synonymous with suffering.

He could not bring himself to attribute it to mere irresponsibility or craziness; it seemed much more likely that her deportment was a roundabout means of communicating an idea she dared not express directly. In her own confused mind the procedure was apparently logical. All he could be certain of was that her basic motivation was fear.

Humanity is everyone but one’s self.

“If that’s the way you feel, it’s all right with me. But you ought to be bright enough to understand that not everybody feels the same way.”

Whenever the thread of his consciousness had unwound too far and got tangled, a little solitude could wind it quickly back.

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.

One year was like another year. Eventually everything would happen.

Then he remembered having heard that Americans did not speak English in any case, that they had a patois which only they could understand among themselves.

It takes energy to invest life with meaning, and at present this energy was lacking.

“But you complain so all the time.” “Oh, not about life; only about human beings.”

If she could only give up, relax, and live in the perfect knowledge that there was no hope. 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 signs are given us for our good, not for our harm.

Reach out, pierce the fine fabric of the sheltering sky, take repose.

“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. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really.

Life is amazing. Nothing ever happens the way one imagines it is going to.

“There’s something repulsive about an American without money in his pocket,”