Malcolm Lowry

Malcolm Lowry (1909-07-28 – 1957-06-26) was an English poet and novelist, best known for his novel Under the Volcano.

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Under the Volcano (1947)

Quotations are cited from the Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition (2000)

• No se puede vivir sin amar.
  • Translation: It is not possible to live without loving.
  • Page 4

• The howling pariah dogs, the cocks that herald dawn all night.
  • Page 34

• 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.
  • Page 34

• 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.
  • Page 35

• What beauty can compare to that of a cantina in the early morning?
  • Page 49

• For a time they confronted each other like two mute unspeaking forts.
  • Page 75

• How shall the murdered man convince his assassin he will not haunt him.
  • Page 79

• But my lord, Yvonne, surely you know by this time I can’t get drunk however much I drink.
  • Page 86

• Nothing in the world was more terrible than an empty bottle! Unless it was an empty glass.
  • Page 87

• The passionate, yet so nearly always hypocritical, affirmation of one’s soul.
  • Page 127

• 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.
  • Page 256

• What is man but a little soul holding up a corpse?
  • Page 296

• The sun shines without brightness, and the moon rises without light.
  • Page 356

• 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.
  • Page 356

• If we could rise from our misery, seek each other once more, and find again the solace of each other’s lips and eyes.
  • Page 357

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