...he refused to consider the Moroccans' present culture, however decadent, a fact, an existing thing. Instead, he seemed to believe that it was something accidentally left over from bygone centuries, now in a necessary state of transition, that the people needed temporary guidance in order to progress to some better condition.

— Paul Bowles

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

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

— Paul Bowles

Looking at him, she felt she knew what the people of antiquity had been like. Thirty centuries or more were effaced, and there he was, the alert and predatory sub-human, further from what she believed man should be like than the naked savage, because the savage was tractable, while this creature, wearing the armor of his own rigid barbaric culture, consciously defied progress. And that was what Steam saw, too; to him the boy was a perfect symbol of human backwardness, and excited his praise precisely because he was “pure”: there was no room in his personality for anything that mankind had not already fully developed long ago. To him, he was a consolation, a living proof that today’s triumph was not yet total; he personified Steam’s infantile hope that time might still be halted and man sent back to his origins.

— Paul Bowles

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

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

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

— Paul Bowles

Often when he was not working he had come here and sat an entire afternoon, lulled by the din and music from the other rooms into a state of vague ecstasy, while he contemplated the small sheet of water outside the window. It was that happy frame of mind into which his people could project themselves so easily - the mere absence of immediate unpleasant preoccupation could start it off, and a landscape which included the sea, a river, a fountain, or anything that occupied the eye without engaging the mind, was of use in sustaining it. It was the world behind the world, where reflection precludes the necessity for action, and the calm which all things seek in death appears briefly in the guise of contentment, the spirit at last persuaded that the still waters of perfection are reachable.

— Paul Bowles

Security is a false god begin making sacrifices to it, and you are lost.

— Paul Bowles

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