Malcolm Lowry - Under the Volcano (1947)

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Good God, if our civilization were to sober up for a couple of days it'd die of remorse on the third.

Malcolm Lowry
And this is how I sometimes think of myself, as a great explorer who has discovered some extraordinary land from which he can never return to give his knowledge to the world: but the name of this land is hell. It is not Mexico of course but in the heart.

Malcolm Lowry
Never think that by releasing me you will be free. You would only condemn us to an ultimate hell on earth. You would only free something else to destroy us both.

Malcolm Lowry
The movements of some more little red birds in the garden, like animated rosebuds, appeared unbearably jittery and thievish. It was as though the creatures were attached by sensitive wires to his nerves.

Malcolm Lowry
It was in eruption, yet no, it wasn't the volcano, the world itself was bursting, bursting into black spouts of villages catapulted into space with himself falling through it all, through the blazing of ten million bodies, falling.

Malcolm Lowry
How alike are the groans of love, to those of the dying.

Malcolm Lowry
Success is like some horrible disaster Worse than your house burning.

Malcolm Lowry
And yet, in these old women it was as if, through the various tragedies of Mexican history, pity, the impulse to approach, and terror, the impulse to escape (as one had learned at college), having replaced it, had finally been reconciled by prudence, the conviction it is better to stay where you are.

Malcolm Lowry
"Christ," he remarked, puzzled, "this is a dingy way to die."

Malcolm Lowry
Somebody threw a dead dog after him down the ravine.

Malcolm Lowry
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.

Malcolm Lowry
But my lord, Yvonne, surely you know by this time I can't get drunk however much I drink.

Malcolm Lowry
For a time they confronted each other like two mute unspeaking forts.

Malcolm Lowry
"What for you lie?" the Chief of Rostrums repeated in a glowering voice. "You say your name is Black. No es Black." He shoved him backwards toward the door. "You say you are a wrider." He shoved him again. "You no are a wrider." He pushed the Consul more violently, but the Consul stood his ground. "You are no a de wrider, you are de espider, and we shoota de espiders in Méjico."

Malcolm Lowry
In the war to come correspondents would assume unheard of importance, plunging through flame to feed the public its little gobbets of dehydrated excrement.

Malcolm Lowry
"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."

Malcolm Lowry
The howling pariah dogs, the cocks that herald dawn all night, the drumming, the moaning that will be found later white plumage huddled on telegraph wires in back gardens or fowl roosting in apple trees, the eternal sorrow that never sleeps of great Mexico.

Malcolm Lowry
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.

Malcolm Lowry
What is man but a little soul holding up a corpse?

Malcolm Lowry
There was something in the wild strength of this landscape, once a battlefield, that seemed to be shouting at him, a presence born of that strength whose cry his whole being recognized as familiar, caught and threw back into the wind, some youthful passage of courage and pride — the passionate, yet so nearly always hypocritical, affirmation of one's soul perhaps, he thought, of the desire to be, to do, good, what was right.

Malcolm Lowry
I want your life filling and stirring me. I want your happiness beneath my heart and your sorrows in my eyes and your peace in the fingers of my hand.

Malcolm Lowry
Nothing in the world was more terrible than an empty bottle! Unless it was an empty glass.

Malcolm Lowry
God, how pointless and empty the world is! Days filled with cheap and tarnished moments succeed each other, restless and haunted nights follow in bitter routine: the sun shines without brightness, and the moon rises without light.

Malcolm Lowry
What beauty can compare to that of a cantina in the early morning?

Malcolm Lowry
How shall the murdered man convince his assassin he will not haunt him.

Malcolm Lowry
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.

Malcolm Lowry
I wake to a darkness in which I must follow myself endlessly, hating the I who so eternally pursues and confronts me. If we could rise from our misery, seek each other once more, and find again the solace of each other's lips and eyes.

Malcolm Lowry