63 Quotes by Malcolm Lowry

Love is the only thing which gives meaning to our poor ways on earth.

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.

The will of man is unconquerable. Even God cannot conquer it.

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?

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

There was no mistaking, even in the uncertain light, the hand, half crabbed, half generous, and wholly drunken, of the Consul himself, the Greek e’s, the flying buttresses of d’s, the t’s like lonely wayside crosses save where they crucified an entire word.

Under the volcano! It was not for nothing the ancients had placed Tartarus under Mt. Aetna, nor within it, the monster Typhoeus, with his hundred heads and – relatively – fearful eyes and voices.

Even almost bad poetry is better than life.

Indeed, on the face of it, this man of abnormal strength and constitution and obscure ambition, whom Hugh would never know, could never deliver nor make agreement to God for, but in his way loved and desired to help, had triumphantly succeeded in pulling himself together.