Paul Scott > Quotes

“English is not spare. But it is beautiful. It cannot be called truthful because its subtleties are infinite. It is the language of a people who have probably earned their reputation for perfidy and hypocrisy because their language itself is so flexible, so often light-headed with statements which appear to mean one thing one year and quite a different thing the next.”
― Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown

“Rumours began with the whispered gossip of native servants and spread quickly to the rest of the population.”
― Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown

“You seem to like everybody. It’s unnatural. It’s also unfortunate. You’re going to waste so much time before you’ve worked out who the people are it’s worth your while to know.”
― Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown

“There’s a difference between trying to stop an injustice and obstructing justice.”
― Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown

“Well, life is not just a business of standing on dry land and occasionally getting your feet wet. It is merely an illusion that some of us stand on one bank and some on the opposite. So long as we stand like that we are not living at all, but dreaming. So jump, jump in, and let the shock wake us up. Even if we drown, at least for a moment or two before we die we shall be awake and alive.”
― Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown

“One always saw and sees through pretense.”
― Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown

“The calendar was a mathematical progression with arbitrary surprises.”
― Paul Scott, The Towers of Silence

“English people are not mass-produced. They do not come off a factory line all looking, speaking, thinking, acting the same. Neither do we.”
― Paul Scott, The Day of the Scorpion

“Deny people something they want, over a longish period, and they naturally start disagreeing about precisely what it is they do want.”
― Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown

“How can people be punished when they are innocent?”
― Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown

“When you spoke to her there wasn’t any mystery. In herself she was all the explanation I felt she needed. And that is rare, isn’t it? To be explained by yourself, by what you are and what you do, and not by what you’ve done, or were, or by what people think you might be or might become.”
― Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown

“In such a fashion human beings call for explanations of the things that happen to them and in such a way scenes and characters are set for exploration, like toys set out by kneeling children intent on pursuing their grim but necessary games.”
― Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown

“There are images that stay vividly in your mind, even after many years: images coupled with the feeling that at the same time came to you. Sometimes you can know that such an image has been selected to stay with you forever out of the hundreds you every day encounter.”
― Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown

“It was extraordinary, Ahmed thought, how men distinguished in one field – and he assumed that Pandit Baba Sahib was distinguished – seemed to claim for themselves wisdom in all spheres of human activity; wisdom and the right to make pronouncements which they expected you to listen to and learn from.”
― Paul Scott, The Day of the Scorpion

“The structure of a friendship is seldom submitted to analysis until it comes under pressure;”
― Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown

“For years, since the eighteenth century, and in each century since, we have said at home, in England, in Whitehall, that the day would come when our rule in India will end, not bloodily, but in peace, in—so we made it seem—a perfect gesture of equality and friendship and love. For years, for nearly a century, the books that Indians have read have been the books of our English radicals, our English liberals. There has been, you see, a seed. A seed planted in the Indian imagination and in the English imagination. Out of it was to come something sane and grave, full of dignity, full of thoughtfulness and kindness and peace and wisdom. For all these qualities are in us, in you, and in me, in old Joseph and Mr. Narayan and Mr. White and I suppose in Brigadier Reid. And they were there too, in Mr. Chaudhuri. For years we have been promising and for years finding means of putting the fulfilment of the promise off until the promise stopped looking like a promise and started looking only like a sinister prevarication, even to me, let alone to Indians who think and feel and know the same as me. And the tragedy is that between us there is this little matter of the colour of the skin, which gets in the way of our seeing through each other’s failings and seeing into each other’s hearts. Because if we saw through them, into them, then we should know. And what we should know is that the promise is a promise and will be fulfilled.” But”
― Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown

“Incidentally, I do not agree with you when you speak of Indian independence having become a foregone conclusion. Independence is not something you can divide into phases. It exists or does not exist. Certain steps might be taken to help bring it into existence, others can be taken that will hinder it doing so. But independence alone is not the idea I pursue, nor the idea which the party I belong to tries to pursue, no doubt making many errors and misjudgements in the process. The idea, you know, isn’t simply to get rid of the British. It is to create a nation capable of getting rid of them and capable simultaneously of taking its place in the world as a nation, and we know that every internal division of our interests hinders the creation of such a nation. That is why we go on insisting that the Congress is an All India Congress. It is an All India Congress first, because you cannot detach from it the idea that it is right that it should be. Only second is it a political party, although one day that is what it must become. Meanwhile, Governor-ji, we try to do the job that your Government has always found it beneficial to leave undone, the job of unifying India, of making all Indians feel that they are, above all else, Indians. You think perhaps we do this to put up a strong front against the British. Partly only you would be right. Principally we do it for the sake of India when you are gone. And we are working mostly in the dark with only a small glimmer of light ahead, because we have never had that kind of India, we do not know what kind of India that will be. This is why I say we are looking for a country. I can look for it better in prison, I’m afraid, than from a seat on your Excellency’s executive council.”
― Paul Scott, The Day of the Scorpion

“It is said that he spoke the language of the greased palm, and this language is international.”
― Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown

“She had devoted her life, in a practical and unimportant way, trying to prove that fear was evil because it promoted prejudice, that courage was good because it was a sign of selflessness, that ignorance was bad because fear sprang from it, that knowledge was good because the more you knew of the world’s complexity the more clearly you saw the insignificance of the part you played.”
― Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown

“As children we accept magic as a normal part of life. Everything seems rooted in it, everything conspires in magic terms.”
― Paul Scott, The Towers of Silence

“in this life, living, there is no dignity except perhaps in laughter.”
― Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown

“the unexpected side of a man’s personality is more memorable than the proof he may appear to give from time to time that he is unchanged, unchangeable.”
― Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown

“She had to make her own marvelous mistakes.”
― Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown

“There’s nothing like a good downpour to cool people off.”
― Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown

“Independence is not something you can divide into phases. It exists or does not exist.”
― Paul Scott, The Day of the Scorpion

“Even when I'm not looking for a meaning one springs naturally to my mind. Do you think it is a disease?”
― Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown

“He said history was a sum of situations whose significance was never seen until long afterwards because people had been afraid to act them out. They couldn’t face up to their responsibility for them. They preferred to think of the situations they found themselves in as part of a general drift of events they had no control over, which meant that they never really understood those situations, and so in a curious way the situations did become part of a general drift of events.”
― Paul Scott, The Day of the Scorpion

“An emigration is possibly the loneliest experience a man can suffer. In a way it is not a country he has lost but a home, or even just a part of a home, a room perhaps, or something in that room that he has had to leave behind, and which haunts him. I remember a window-seat I used to sit in as a youth, reading Pushkin and teaching myself to smoke scented cigarettes. That window is one I am always knocking at, asking to be let in.”
― Paul Scott, A Division of the Spoils

“the exercise of authority was not an easy business, especially if those who exercised it no longer felt they had heaven on their side. That”
― Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown

“Romesh Chand was a man who did not believe in telephones, in the necessity for telephones,”
― Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown