Paul Bowles Quotes

Decay and disease are often beautiful, like the pearly tear of the shellfish and the hectic glow of consumption.

Sickness is mankind's greatest defect.

Every sickness has an alien quality, a feeling of invasion and loss of control that is evident in the language we use about it.

The young disease, that must subdue at length, Grows with his growth, and strengthens with his strength.

A human being is primarily a bag for putting food into.

Optimism is the first symptom that any disease is fatal.

The hospital is the antechamber to the tomb

If I had bodily functions, I think I would have peed my pants.

Racism does not diminish with brains, it's a disease, a sickness, it may incubate in ignorance but it doesn't necessarily disappear with the gaining of wisdom!

And in bed, deep inside the building, are all the headaches that won't go away. The failed kidneys, the rashes, the ragged-edged moles, the lumps on the breast, the coughs that have turned nasty. In the Marie Curie Ward on the fourth floor are the kids with cancer. Their bodies secretly and slowly being consumed. And then there's the mortuary, where the dead lie in refrigerated drawers with name tags on their feet.

The study of sickness is the most poetic of the sciences.

Matthey, a Geneva physician very close to Rousseau's influence, formulates the prospect for all men of reason: 'Do not glory in your state, if you are wise and civilized men; an instant suffices to disturb and annihilate that supposed wisdom of which you are so proud; an unexpected event, a sharp and sudden emotion of the soul will abruptly change the most reasonable and intelligent man into a raving idiot.

Think I'm gettin' sick, I'm feelin' illegal/ And not having money is the root of all evil

Dying is almost the least spiritual of our acts, more strictly carnal even than the act of love. There are Death Agonies that are like the strainings of the Costive at stool.

We are all potentially such sick men. The sanest and best of us are of one clay with lunatics and prison-inmates. And whenever we feel this, such a sense of the vanity of our voluntary career comes over us, that all our morality appears but as a plaster hiding a sore it can never cure, and all our well-doing as the hollowest substitute for that well-being that our lives ought to be grounded in, but alas! are not.

To be born in imbecility, in the midst of pain and crisis; to be the plaything of ignorance, error, need, sickness, wickedness, and passions; to return step by step to imbecility, from the time of lisping to that of doting; to live among knaves and charlatans of all kinds; to die between one man who takes your pulse and another who troubles your head; never to know where you come from, why you come and where you are going! That is what is called the most important gift of our parents and nature. Life.

You can’t keep messing me around like this. It’s been going on too long. I can’t take it anymore. I get sick every time you come around. Then I get sick when you leave. You’re like a disease to me.

A temperate Diet frees from Diseases; such are seldom ill, but if they are surprised with Sickness, they bear it better, and recover sooner; for most Distempers have their Original from Repletion.

Don't get sick, and if you do get sick, die quickly.

Lust-bred diseases rot thee.

I know I'm getting old because there will be times when I'm not even doing anything and I'll think, 'I need to go wipe my ass right now.'

There is something in sickness that breaks down the pride of manhood.

I contemplate the body, dead and diseased as well as alive and healthy.

A cold in the head in June is an immoral thing.

I feel like I might start crying and that I'm going to cry pee.