Illness reduces man to his basic state: a cloaca in which the chemical processes continue. The meaningless hegemony of the involuntary.
Paul BowlesHow many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.
Paul BowlesIt was one of the charms of the International Zone that you could get anything you wanted if you paid for it. Do anything, too, for that matter; - there were no incorruptibles. It was only a question of price.
Paul BowlesThe only effort worth making is the one it takes to learn the geography of one's own nature.
Paul BowlesWhereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another. Indeed, he would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was he had felt most at home.
Paul Bowles