Malcolm Lowry

"Though tragedy was in the process of becoming unreal and meaningless it seemed one was still permitted to remember the days when an individual life held some value and was not a mere misprint in a communiqué."

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

"In the final analysis there was no one you could trust to drink with you to the bottom of the bowl."

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

"Yes, I do love you, I have all the love in the world left for you, only that love seems so far away from me and so strange too, for it is as though I could almost hear it, a droning or weeping, but far, far away, and a sad lost sound, it might be either approaching or receding, I can’t tell which."

"And how could he know whether it was a good omen or not without another drink?"

"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."