{"author":"Paul Bowles","author_id":"Paul+Bowles","total_quotes":35,"quotes":[{"text":"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 of Independence, say: our politique, you know they mean: our lies. All lies are sins. And so, which displeases Allah more, a lie told by a Nazarene, who doesn’t know the true faith from the false, or a lie told by a Moslem, who does?","author":"Paul Bowles","tags":["colonialism","french","french-colonialism","french-morocco","lies","morocco","moslem","nazarene","politics","politique","sins","truth"],"id":1106,"author_id":"Paul+Bowles"},{"text":"Fiction should always steer clear of political considerations.","author":"Paul Bowles","tags":["fiction","politics"],"id":4716,"author_id":"Paul+Bowles"},{"text":"How fragile we are under the sheltering sky. Behind the sheltering sky is a vast dark universe, and we're just so small.","author":"Paul Bowles","tags":["existentialism","humanity","life"],"id":6126,"author_id":"Paul+Bowles"},{"text":"...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 of it, as was the man opposite him, and it was a part of them; it whispered to them that time was short, that the world they lived in was approaching its end, and beyond was unfathomable darkness. It was the premonition of inevitable defeat and annihilation, and it had always been there with them and in them, as intangible and as real as the night around them. Amar pulled two loose cigarettes out of his pocket and handed one to the potter. 'Ah, the Moslems, the Moslems!' he sighed. 'Who knows what's going to happen to them?","author":"Paul Bowles","tags":["history","islam","muslims"],"id":23434,"author_id":"Paul+Bowles"},{"text":"You have to hate them, you mean? You can’t decide: I will or I won’t hate them?”Amar did not completely understand. “But I hate them now,” he explained. “The day Allah wants me to stop hating them, He’ll change my heart.”The man was smiling, as if to himself. “If the world’s really like that, it’s very easy to be in it,” he said.“It will never be easy to be in the world,” Amar said firmly. “Er tabi mabrhach. God doesn’t want it easy.","author":"Paul Bowles","tags":["colonialism","easy","french-morocco","god","hate","morocco"],"id":25944,"author_id":"Paul+Bowles"},{"text":"...It is far more sinful to pray irregularly than not to pray at all.","author":"Paul Bowles","tags":["prayer"],"id":34227,"author_id":"Paul+Bowles"},{"text":"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.","author":"Paul Bowles","tags":["government"],"id":45311,"author_id":"Paul+Bowles"},{"text":"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 he had elected to command. But to Stenham that seemed a shallow reply. To him wisdom consisted in the conscious and joyous obedience to natural laws, yet when he had said that to Moss, Moss had laughed pityingly. 'My dear man, wisdom is a primitive concept,' he had told him. 'What we want now is knowledge.' Only great disillusionment could make a man say such a thing, Stenham believed.","author":"Paul Bowles","tags":["disillusionment","dominion","francis-bacon","knowledge","nature","primitive","tao","wisdom"],"id":45562,"author_id":"Paul+Bowles"},{"text":"At some point in the night she had a dream. Or it was possible that she was partially awake, and was only remembering a dream? She was alone among the rocks on a dark coast beside the sea. The water surged upward and fell back languidly, and in the distance she heard surf breaking slowly on a sandy shore. It was comforting to be this close to the surface of the ocean and gaze at the intimate nocturnal details of its swelling and ebbing. And as she listened to the faraway breakers rolling up onto the beach, she became aware of another sound entwined with the intermittent crash of waves: a vast horizontal whisper across the bossom of the sea, carrying an ever-repeated phrase, regular as a lighthouse flashing: Dawn will be breaking soon. She listened a long time: again and again the scarcely audible words were whispered across the moving water. A great weight was being lifted slowly from her; little by little her happiness became more complete, and she awoke. Then she lay for a few minutes marveling the dream, and once again fell asleep.","author":"Paul Bowles","tags":["dream","happiness","life"],"id":54272,"author_id":"Paul+Bowles"},{"text":"The insistent drums were an unwelcome reminder of the existence of another world, wholly autonomous, with its own necessities and patterns. The message they were beating out, over and over, was for her; it was saying, not precisely that she did not exist but rather that it did not matter whether she existed or not, that her presence was of no consequence to the rest of the cosmos. It was a sensation that suddenly paralyzed her with dread. There had never been any question of her “mattering”; it went without saying that she mattered, because she was important to herself. But what was the part of her to which she mattered?","author":"Paul Bowles","tags":["autonomy","drums","existentialism","meaning-of-life","message","observer","subjectivity","the-other"],"id":59013,"author_id":"Paul+Bowles"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":35,"pages":4,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}