Quotes from Paul Scott

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

Insularity, like empire-building, requires superb self-confidence, a conviction of one's moral superiority. An English caricature of an Indian - possessive towards people with power, arrogant to those with none. Through a narrow Moghul arch into a dark stone corridor - the kind in which you feel the weight of India: a heavy darkness which is a protection from glare and heat but reminiscent of tombs and dungeons.

There's nothing like a good downpour to cool people off.

there is nothing more gullible in the whole animal world than a human being? One has this hysterical belief in the non-recurrence of the abysmal, I suppose. One always imagines one has reached the nadir and that the only possible next move is up and out.

I do not love thee, Dr Fell, the reason why I cannot tell.

Ah, oui, pauvre papillon. C'est un de mes prisonniers

In India nearly everybody spoke metaphorically except the English who spoke bluntly and could make their most transparent lies look honest as a consequence; whereas any truth contained in these metaphorical rigmaroles was so deviously presented that it looked devious itself.

We still equate fair skin with superior intelligence. Even equate it with beauty. The sun is too strong here. It darkens us and saps us. Paleness is synonymous with worldly success, because paleness is the mark of intellectual, not physical endeavor and worldly success is seldom achieved with the muscles.

she felt there was between them an unexpected mutual confidence, confidence of the kind that could spring up between two strangers who found themselves thrown together quite fortuitously in difficult circumstances that might turn out to be either frightening or amusing. And

I do not, she thought, no I do not, give a damn. The Furies were riding across an uninhabited sky, to their own and no one else's destruction.

there being somewhere in this curious centuries-long association a kind of love with hate on the obverse side, as in a coin.

If there are things you don't know, you call the gap in your knowledge a mystery and fill it in with a wholly emotional answer.

riot squads were ready to go into action. Although these young English boys (many of them civilians themselves little more than a year ago, and with only a very sketchy idea of the problems of administering Imperial

She wanted to ask, How long? A year? Less more? Any time? But she had lived long enough to know that you did not ask questions to which there were no answers and which you didn't want answered.

the one thing to which the human spirit could always accommodate itself was chaos and misfortune.

The permutations of English corruption in India were endless – affection for servants, for peasants, for soldiers, pretence at understanding the Indian intellectual or at sympathizing with nationalist aspirations, but all this affection and understanding was a corruption of what he called the calm purity of their contempt.

The English, once they began falling physically apart, did so with all their customary attention to detail, as if fitting themselves in advance for their own corpses to make sure they were going to be comfortable in them.

He turned away and stumped on down the road leaving her to follow. The view from the back was that of an old man, thin, frail, intolerable to live with, intolerable to think of as one day not being there because then she would have nothing to live for herself.

wily minds and cold hearts were the combination Bronowsky found most common in English administrators.

Is not our capacity to laugh and cry the measure of our humanity?

frightened people shriek the loudest and fire at random.

Are we not all creatures of chance?

She felt the curious flattening of inquiring spirit the traveller suffers from, knowing himself without occupation or investment in the fortunes of a strange city.

I walk home, thinking of another place, of seemingly long endless summers and the shade of different kinds of trees; and then of winters when the branches of the trees were bare, so bare that, recalling them now, it seems inconceivable to me that I looked at them and did not think of the summer just gone, and the spring soon to come, as illusions; as dreams, never fulfilled, never to be fulfilled.' Philoctetes.