Quotes from Paul Scott

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.

Rumours began with the whispered gossip of native servants and spread quickly to the rest of the population.

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.

There's a difference between trying to stop an injustice and obstructing justice.

The calendar was a mathematical progression with arbitrary surprises.

English people are not mass-produced. They do not come off a factory line all looking, speaking, thinking, acting the same. Neither do we.

One always saw and sees through pretense.

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 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.

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.

Deny people something they want, over a longish period, and they naturally start disagreeing about precisely what it is they do want.

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.

How can people be punished when they are innocent?

As children we accept magic as a normal part of life. Everything seems rooted in it, everything conspires in magic terms.

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.

I am an old man. I am entitled, am I not, to say what I think?—and of course to stray from the point.

She had to make her own marvelous mistakes.

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.

The permutations of English corruption in India were endless

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.

The structure of a friendship is seldom submitted to analysis until it comes under pressure;

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.

in this life, living, there is no dignity except perhaps in laughter.

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.