Quotes from Paul Scott

Unfortunately, there is always an unmapped area of dangerous fallibility between a policy and its pursuit.

we wonder what the fuss was about and aren't sure that our own government is doing any better, or even that it is a government that represents us. It seems more to be the government of an uneasy marriage between old orthodoxy and old revolutionaries, and such people have nothing to say to us that we want to hear.

When he got to the shoe putting-on stage he called Hosain again. Putting on and taking off his own shoes and boots were activities at which he drew the line if there was a man available to perform these services. He had learned to draw the line in Muzzafirabad where his first CO, Colonel Gawstone, advised him never to stoop if he could help it. The climate wasn't right for it. Mrs. Gawstone had stooped to pick up a glove and keeled right over and never got up. They had buried her the next day.

She showed courage and that's the most difficult thing in the world for any human being to show

pay her back for imaginary wrongs, or real wrongs she had not personally done him but had done representatively because she was of her race and of her colour, and he could not in his simple rage any longer distinguish between individual and crowd.

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. She

She did not divide conduct into parts. She was attempting always a wholeness. When there is wholeness there are no causes. Only there is living. The contribution of the whole of one's life, the whole of one's resources, to the world at large. This, like the courage to leap

Rejected seed of a diseased pig-eater,' I began. 'Despised dropping from a dead vulture's crutch. Eater of sweeper's turds and feeder on after-birth. Fart in the holy silence of the universe and limp pudenda on the body of the false prophet.

She did not divide conduct into parts. She was attempting always a wholeness. When there is wholeness there are no causes. Only there is living. The contribution of the whole of one's life, the whole of one's resources, to the world at large.

Compulsively tidy people, one is told, are always wiping the slate clean, trying to give themselves what life denies all of us, a fresh start.

She had had a good life. It had its comic elements. Its scattered relics had not been and now can never all be retrieved; but some of them were blessed by the good intentions that created them.

The existence of well-to-do little neutral countries is a pointer to what global war is really all about

But it isn't the best we should remember,' she said, and shocked herself by speaking aloud, and clutched the folds and mother-of-pearl buttons in that habitual gesture. We must remember the worst because the worst is the lives we lead, the best is only our history, and between our history and our lives there is this vast dark plain where the rapt and patient shepherds drive their invisible flocks in expectation of God's forgiveness. *

Here, on the ground, nothing is likely, everything possible.

time, stability and loyalty, which are not things usually to be reaped without first being sown. Perhaps

To be rejected—which I suppose is one of the easiest ways of making your mark, you have to come right out with something they see as directly and forcefully opposed to what they think they believe in. To be accepted you have to be seen and heard to appear to stand for what they think they believe in. To be neither one thing nor the other is probably unforgivable. But

Her attitude to the girls became that of an aunt who knew her nieces had heard her discussed unfavorably but could not help showing her interest in them and some of her affection.Indeed she seemedm to acquire something of the thick skin such a woman had to cultivate if her feelings were not to be constantly hurt by inattention to her questions, opinions, and fund of boring anecdotes.

He was twenty-five but had that elongated bony English look of not yet having completed the process of growing-up and filling out which meant in a few years he would suddenly appear middle-aged as well as beefy because to men like this everything seemed to happen at once round about the age of thirty; everything except white hair which was reserved for retirement and was equally sudden and the only sign that old age had arrived.

The sweet indifference of man's environment to his problems. Pathetic fallacy or no, I really felt it, an indifference to us that amounted to contempt.

It is only an insincere people that can be accused of hypocrisy.

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. I

I remember one party when we seemed to be absolutely stranded. Perhaps that was symbolic, Mr Turner. I mean everyone else gone and just Tusker and me, peering out into the dark waiting for transport that never turned up.

Look, it's the same color as mine. Don't be fooled by that. People are. But prick an imbecile and he'll bleed crimson. So will a dog.

Ah, well, the truth is always one thing, but in a way it's the other thing, the gossip, that counts. It shows where people's hearts lie.