Steam had always taken it for granted that the dichotomy of belief and behavior was the cornerstone of the Mosley world. It was too deep to be called hypocrisy; it was merely custom. They said one thing and they did something else. They affirmed their adherence to Islam in formulated phrases, but they behaved as though they believed, and actually did believe, something quite different. Still, the unchanging profession of faith was there, and to him, it was this eternal contradiction which made them Muslims. But Amar’s relationship to his religion was far more robust: he believed it's possible to practice literally what the Koran enjoined him to profess. He kept the precepts constantly in his hand, and applied them on every occasion, at every moment. The fact that such a person as Amar could be produced by this society rather upset Steam’s calculations. For Steam, the exception invalidated the rule instead of proving it: if there were one Amar, there could be others. Then the Moroccans were not the known quantity he had thought they were, inexorably conditioned by the pressure of their own rigid society; his entire construction was false in consequence, because it was too simple and did not make allowances for individual variations.

— Paul Bowles

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, then in another, or in the vast patio with its fountains, or on the roof, leading the existence of nomads inside the beautiful shell which was the house. If he had felt that they were capable of discarding their utter preoccupation with the present, in order to consider the time not yet arrived, he would straightway have lost interest in them and condemned them as corrupt.

— Paul Bowles

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 of 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?

— Paul Bowles

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 Steam 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, Steam believed.

— Paul Bowles

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 unheard music, familiar but forgotten because long ago it was interrupted and only now has suddenly resumed playing. The silent melodies pass through the fabric of the consciousness like the wind through the meshes of a net, without moving it, but at the same time unmistakably there, all around it. For one who has never lived such a morning, its advent can be a paralyzing experience.

— Paul Bowles

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.

— Paul Bowles

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 looks to me as if it is going to go on, because the French aren't going to give in, and certainly the Arabs aren't, because they can't. They're fighting with their backs the wall."" I thought maybe you meant you expected a new world war," he lied." That's the least of my worries. When that comes, we've had it. You can't sit around mooning about Judgement Day. That's just silly. Everybody who ever lived has always had his own private Judgment Day to face anyway, and he still has. As far as that goes, nothing's changed at all.

— Paul Bowles

The sky here's very strange. I often have the sensation when I look at it that it's a solid thing up there, protecting us from what's behind. . . [from] nothing, I suppose. Just darkness. Absolute night.

— Paul Bowles

The soul is the weariest part of the body.

— Paul Bowles

Whenever he was en route from one place to another, he was able to look at his life with a little more objectivity than usual. It was often on trips that he thought most clearly, and made the decisions that he could not reach when he was stationary.

— Paul Bowles