, which was voted No. 11 in the Modern Library 100 Best Novels list.
Lowry was born in New Brighton
, Wirral
, the fourth son of Arthur Lowry, a cotton broker with roots in Cumberland
, and Evelyn Boden. He was educated at The Leys School
(the school made famous by the novel Goodbye, Mr. Chips
) and St Catharine's College, Cambridge
. His home was a substantial 5-acre estate with a tennis court, small golf course and a maid who cooked for the family.
No se puede vivir sin amar.
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.
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.
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.
What beauty can compare to that of a cantina in the early morning?
For a time they confronted each other like two mute unspeaking forts.
How shall the murdered man convince his assassin he will not haunt him.
But my lord, Yvonne, surely you know by this time I can’t get drunk however much I drink.
Nothing in the world was more terrible than an empty bottle! Unless it was an empty glass.
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.