Malcolm Lowry

“My lover. Oh come to me again as once in May.”

“-Mira, Frijolillo -el Cónsul oía sus propias palabras-, tener en tu contra a Franco o a Hitler es una cosa, pero tener a Actinio, Argón, Berilio, Disprosio, Niobio, Paladio, Praseodimio...-Mira, Geoff...-...Rutenio, Samario, Silicón, Tántalo, Telurio, Terbio, Torio...-Mira...-Tulio, Titanio, Uranio, Vanadio, Virginio, Zenón, Iterbio, Circonio, por no hablar de Europio y Germanio... ¡Hip!... ¡Y Columbio!... Contra ti y contra todos los demás, es otra -el Cónsul acabó su cerveza.”

“Yes, it struck her now that this whole business of the bull was like a life; the important birth, the fair chance, the tentative, then assured, then half-dispairing circulations of the ring, an obstacle negotiated - a feat improperly recognized - boredom, resignation, collapse: then another, more convulsive birth, a new start; the circumspect endeavours to obtain one's bearings in a world now frankly hostile, the apparent but deceptive encouragement of one's judges, half of whom were asleep, the swervings into the beginnings of disaster because of that same negligible obstacle one had surely taken before at a stride, the final enmeshment in the toils of enemies one was never quite certain weren't friends more clumsy than actively ill-disposed, followed by disaster, capitulation, disintegration.”

“Somebody threw a dead dog after him down the ravine.”

“¿LE GUSTA ESTE JARDIN QUE ES SUYO? ¡EVITE QUE SUS HIJOS LODESTRUYAN!”

“Ah, guilt and sorrow had dogged Juan's footsteps too, for he was not a Catholic who could rise refreshed from the cold bath of confession. Yet the banality stood: that the past was irrevocably past. And conscience had been given man to regret it only in so far as that might change the future. For man, every man, Juan seemed to be telling him, even as Mexico, must ceaselessly struggle upward. What was life but a warfare and a stranger's sojourn?”

“لا تحصى المزايا التى جلبتها لنا الحضارةولا تعد الطاقة المنتجة لكل انواع الثراء التىأوجدتها ابتكارات العلم واكتشافاته.ولا تتصور الإبداعات الرائعة للجنس الإنسانىمن اجل أن يكون البشر أكثر سعادة،أكثر حرية وأكثر كمالا..ولا مثيل للمنابعالصافية والخصبة للحياة الجديدةغير المتاحة حتى الآن لشفاة متعطشةلبشر يواصلون أعمالهم الخانقة وغير الإنسانية”

“and as they stood in silence before her, prayed again. "Nothing is altered and in spite of God's mercy I am still alone. Though my suffering seems senseless I am still in agony. There is no explanation of my life." Indeed there was not, nor was this what he'd meant to convey. "Please let Yvonne have her dream -- dream? -- of a new life with me -- please let me believe that all that is not an abominable self-deception," he tried... "Please let me make her happy, deliver me from this dreadful tyranny of self. I have sunk low. Let me sink lower still, that I may know the truth. Teach me to love again, to love life." That wouldn't do either... "Where is love? Let me truly suffer. Give me back my purity, the knowledge of the Mysteries, that I have betrayed and lost. -- Let me be truly lonely, that I may honestly pray. Let us be happy again somewhere, if it's only together, if it's only out of this terrible world. Destroy the world!" he cried in his heart.”

“Adiós," she added in Spanish, "I have no house only a shadow. But whenever you are in need of a shadow, my shadow is yours.""Thank you.""Sank you.""Not sank you, Señora Gregorio, thank you.""Sank you.”

“To say nothing of what you lose, lose, lose, are losing, man. You fool, you stupid fool ... You've even been insulated from the responsibility of genuine suffering ... Even the suffering you do endure is largely unnecessary. Actually spurious. It lacks the very basis you require of it for its tragic nature. You deceive yourself.”

“When I should have been producing obscure volumes of verse entitled the Triumph of Humpty Dumpty or the Nose with the Luminous Dong! Or at best, like Clare, "weaving fearful vision" ... A frustrated poet in every man. Though it is perhaps a good idea under the circumstances to pretend at least to be proceeding with one's great work on "Secret Knowledge," then one can always say when it never comes out that the title explains the deficiency.”

“For a time they confronted each other like two mute unspeaking forts.”

“And I'm afraid it really is a jungle too," pursued the Consul, "in fact I expect Rousseau to come riding out of it at any moment on a tiger." "What's that?" Mr Quincey said, frowning in a manner that might have meant: And God never drinks before breakfast either."On a tiger," the Consul repeated.The other gazed at him a moment with the cold sardonic eye of the material world. "I expect so," he said sourly. "Plenty tigers. Plenty elephants too... Might I ask you if the next time you inspect your jungle you'd mind being sick on your own side of the fence?”

“Only against death does man cry out in vain.”

“Interchangeable ever were the terms of abuse with which the aggressor discredits those about to be ravaged!”

“The Consul felt a pang. Ah, to have a horse, and gallop away, singing, to someone you loved perhaps, into the heart of all the simplicity and peace in the world; was that not like the opportunity afforded man by life itself? Of course not. Still, just for a moment, it had seemed that it was.”

“Chi ha respirato la polvere delle strade del Messico, non troverà più pace in nessun altro paese.”

“No se puede vivir sin amar”

“How, unless you drink as I do, could you hope to understand the beauty of an old Indian woman playing dominoes with a chicken?”

“Perhaps his tragedy is that he is the only normal writer left on earth -- and it is this that adds to his isolation and so too his so sense of guilt.”

“Under the Volcano” embraces everything from Dante to Freud to the cabala. Here it shambles like Cervantes, there it rages like Ahab, and every page of it pulsates on Out of Body Auto-Reply, that style of pure Lowry that points at once backward, to all European literature, and forward, to the mother of all nervous breakdowns.”