Paul Bowles Quotes

I have never heard anyone say This is it. I know right now is the high point of my life. It will never get any better. Only in retrospect do we recognize the best times and of course then it is too late.

Looking back over my life so far I am able to remember specific days that were perfect. These tend to be days, and parts of days, in which nothing in particular happened, except that I was utterly happy.

Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.

What we are really living for is the experience of life, both the pain and the pleasure.

In every life there is a perfect moment, like a flash of sun. We can shape our days by that, if we will - before by faith, and afterward by memory.

He is dead already who doth not feel Life is worth living still.

Life is not long for anybody, and the problem is only to make something of it.

If you love life you also love the past, because it is the present as it has survived in memory." Translation by David Downie

If you have lived, take thankfully the past. Make, as you can, the sweet remembrance last.

He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past

The end of living is the true enjoyment of it.

To live your life in the fear of losing it is to lose the point of life.

It might be said that a great unstated reason for travel is to find places that exemplify where one has been happiest. Looking for idealised versions of home-indeed, looking for the perfect memory.

Let me hold on to this the way it was, before I knew anything else.

Don't think about what you've left behind. If what one finds is made of pure matter, it will never spoil. And one can always come back. If what you had found was only a moment of light, like the explosion of a star, you would find nothing on your return.

I knew that it wouldn’t last. It was just a moment, a perfect moment, as time stood still and fleetingly everything fell back into its proper place.

To be happy is not the purpose for which you are placed in this world.

Mr. Barnes, it is because I have lived very much that now I can enjoy everything so well

It's better to repent what you enjoyed than to repent not having enjoyed anything.

Hope is a memory that desires, the memory is a memory that has enjoyed.

When someone dies, you don't get over it by forgetting; you get over it by remembering, and you are aware that no person is ever truly lost or gone once they have been in our life and loved us, as we have loved them.

You have to remember that goodbyes are temporary because no one ever really leaves and nothing lasts forever. People are always with us, because they are in our hearts and in our memory. The only thing we can depend on is change... Life is just a series of moments -- a string of pearls that make up the necklace of your life and so every once in a while, to complete the circle, you need to end a chapter.

The man who gets the most out of life is not the one who has lived it longest, but the one who has felt life most deeply.

Life's objective is life itself.

What is human life? The first third a good time; the rest remembering about it.