Paul Bowles Quotes

You only live a short time... and you are dead a long time.

Because we do not know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. And yet everything happens only a certain number of times. And a very small number really.

I am not eternity, but a man; a part of the whole, as an hour is of the day.

Death, thou art infinite; it is life is little.

Things may serve long, but not serve ever.

For one thing we may be grateful: this life is not eternal.

Exhaust the little moment / Soon it dies.

The living is merely a type of what is dead, and a very rare type.

Life... It's a great and terrible and short and endless thing. None of us come out of it alive.

All I kept thinking about, over and over, was 'You can't live forever; you can't live forever.

Well, there's a remedy for all things but death, which will be sure to lay us flat one time or other.

And introduce an element of cynicism and darkness into it and just realize that we're all vulnerable. We are humans. There is a finite end to this life and we're all going to face it and a little silliness can help.

Life is hardly more than a fraction of a second. Such a little time to prepare oneself for eternity!

Life is much shorter than I imagined it to be.

You are not a beautiful, unique snowflake... This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time.

The end of a picture is always an end of a life.

We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.

Tomorrow is not promised to any of us.

Men talk of killing time, while time quietly kills them.

There's always a race against time. I don't think for one moment that life gets better. How can it? One's body starts to fall apart.

Remember, tomorrow is promised to no one.

Life and death matters, yes. And the question of how to behave in this world, how to go in the face of everything. Time is short and the water is rising.

You never know how much time you have left.

Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow may be for us and it may not.