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Book: The Spider's House
Quotes of Book: The Spider's House
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  1. 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. 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.
    book-quoteknowledgewisdomnature

  2. Paul Bowles _ The Spider's House

    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 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.
    book-quoterevolutionfrenchindependence

  3. Paul Bowles _ The Spider's House

    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?
    book-quotemeaning-of-lifeexistentialismsubjectivity

  4. Paul Bowles _ The Spider's House

    Every little thing makes a difference, whether you decide it yourself or whether it's pure accident. So many people have had the whole course of their lives changed by something perfectly simple like, let's say, crossing the street at one point instead of another.""Yes, yes, yes, I know," Stenham said with exaggerated weariness. "As far as I'm concerned that's just as boring, and a lot more false, by the way. The point I'm trying to make is that he loves his world of Koranic law because it's his, and at the same time he hates it because his intuition tells him it's at the end of its rope. He can't expect anything more from it. And our world, he hates that too, just on general principles, and yet it's his only hope, the only way out-if there is one for him personally, which I doubt.
    book-quotecultureway-of-lifekoran

  5. 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?
    book-quote

  6. Paul Bowles _ The Spider's House

    nothing would have meaning, because the knowing was itself the meaning; beyond that there was nothing to know."
    book-quotemeaning

  7. Paul Bowles _ The Spider's House

    That was one of the troubles with the Istiqlal, with all politics: you talked about people as though they were not really people, as though they were only things, numbers, animals, perhaps, but not really people.
    book-quotepolitics

  8. Paul Bowles _ The Spider's House

    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.
    book-quote

  9. 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.
    book-quote

  10. Paul Bowles _ The Spider's House

    ... the Istiqlal was powerful, which did not at all coincide with his conception of it, nor with the picture the organization painted of itself: a purely defensive group of selfless martyrs who were willing to brave the brutality of the French in order to bring hope to their suffering countrymen.
    book-quote

  11. Paul Bowles _ The Spider's House

    ...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?
    book-quoteislammuslims

  12. Paul Bowles _ The Spider's House

    Пожалуй, огромное различие состояло в том, что Запад оказывался гуманнее: он предусматривал для своих пациентов анестезию, в то время как Восток, принимая страдание как нечто само собой разумеещеся, устремлялся навтречу грядущему кошмару с предельным равнодушием к боли.
    book-quote
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