The Spider's House Quotes

“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, The Spider's House

“If people are living the same as always, with their bellies full of food, they'll just go on the same way. If they get hungry and unhappy enough, something happens.”
― Paul Bowles, The Spider's House

“...before there can be change there must be discontent.”
― Paul Bowles, The Spider's House

“How peaceful it was, with the light evening breeze stirring the small leaves of the grapevine that clustered around the electric bulb, making the shadows move and change on the yellow mat below. For a moment he pushed aside the thought of money. From time to time the dark water beside them rippled audibly, as if a tiny fish had come to the surface for an instant and then darted beneath. It was in peaceful moments such as this, his father had said, that men were given to know just a little of what paradise was like, so that they might yearn for it with all their soul,and strive during their time on earth to be worthy of going there.”
― Paul Bowles, The Spider's House

“He could not feel at ease with gourmets and hedonists; they were a hostile species.”
― Paul Bowles, The Spider's House

“One of these days the future will be here, and you won't be ready for it.”
― Paul Bowles, The Spider's House

“If you could not have freedom you could still have vengeance.”
― Paul Bowles, The Spider's House

“Writing is harmless, and it keeps me in dinners and out of trouble.”
― Paul Bowles, The Spider's House

“Fiction should always steer clear of political considerations.”
― Paul Bowles, The Spider's House

“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, The Spider's House

“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, The Spider's House

“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 postwar years he had lived in solitude and carefully planned ignorance of what was happening in the world. Nothing had importance save the exquisitely isolated cosmos of his own consciousness. Then little by little he had had the impression that the light of meaning, the meaning of everything was dying. Like a flame under a glass it had dwindled, flickered and gone out, and all existence, including his own hermetic structure from which he had observed existence, had become absurd and unreal.”
― Paul Bowles, The Spider's House

“When I first came here it was a pure country. There was music and dancing and magic every day in the streets.
"Now it's finished, everything. Even the religion. In a few more years the whole country will be like all the other Moslem countries, just a huge European slum, full of poverty and hatred.”
― Paul Bowles, The Spider's House

“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, The Spider's House

“In the school they teach you what the world means, and once you have learned, you will always know," Amar's father had told him.
"But suppose the world changes?" Amar had thought. "Then what would you know?”
― Paul Bowles, The Spider's House

“I think that's the point of view of an outsider, a tourist who puts picturesqueness above everything else.”
― Paul Bowles, The Spider's House

“Everything's explained by the constant intervention of Allah. And whatever happens had to happen, and was decreed at the beginning of time, and there's no way of even imagining how anything could have been different from what it is.”
― Paul Bowles, The Spider's House

“After all, the English are really too much. One can't live in that constipated fashion forever.”
― Paul Bowles, The Spider's House

“...a man could scarcely make his writing a reason for living unless he believed in the validity of that writing.”
― Paul Bowles, The Spider's House

“You can't discipline the whole country."
"Still," Moss said dreamily, "that's what must be done before they can ever accomplish anything.”
― Paul Bowles, The Spider's House

“May Allah bless you." Or had she said: "May Allah burn you?" He was not sure which: the two Arabic words sounded so much alike.”
― Paul Bowles, The Spider's House

“...It is far more sinful to pray irregularly than not to pray at all.”
― Paul Bowles, The Spider's House

“... how could any young man merely sit back and wait for divine justice to take its course? It was asking the impossible.”
― Paul Bowles, The Spider's House

“He knew it was necessary to drive the French out, but he had always imagined that this would be done gloriously, with thousands of men on horseback flashing their swords and calling upon Allah to aid them in their holy mission ... It was hard to see any connection between the splendid war of liberation and all this whispering and frowning.”
― Paul Bowles, The Spider's House

“He doesn't know what the world is like today." The thought that his own conception of the world was so different from his father's was like a protecting wall around his entire being. When his father went out into the street he had only the mosque, the Koran, the other old men in his mind. It was the immutable world of law, the written word, unchanging beneficence, but it was in some way wrinkled and dried up. Whereas when Amar stepped out the door there was the whole vast earth waiting, the live mysterious earth, that belonged to him in a way it could belong to no one else, and where anything at all might happen.”
― Paul Bowles, The Spider's House

“nothing would have meaning, because the knowing was itself the meaning; beyond that there was nothing to know.”
― Paul Bowles, The Spider's House

“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, The Spider's House

“At least you can say you were in on the last days of Morocco," he told her. "How's your tea? Finished? I think we ought to be going.”
― Paul Bowles, The Spider's House

“But don't we all like to be overpowered, one time or another.”
― Paul Bowles, The Spider's House

“The key question, it seemed to him, was that of whether man was to obey Nature, or attempt to command her.”
― Paul Bowles, The Spider's House