Paul Scott QUOTES

82 " But it is not these things which most impress the stranger on his journey into the civil lines, into the old city itself (where he becomes lost and notes the passage of a woman dressed in the burkha in the street of the moneylenders) and then back past the secretariat, the Legislative Assembly and Government House, and on into the old cantonment in a search for points of present contact with the reality of twenty years ago, the repercussions, for example, of the affair in the Bibighar Gardens. What impresses him is something for which there is no memorial but which all these things collectively bear witness to: the fact that here in Ranpur, and in places like Ranpur, the British came to the end of themselves as they were. "

― Paul Scott , The Day of the Scorpion

84 " Such a marvelous opportunity wasted. I mean for us, by us. Indians feel it too, don’t they? I mean, in spite of the proud chests and all the excitement of sitting down as free men at their own desks to work out a constitution. Won’t that constitution be a sort of love letter to the English—the kind an abandoned lover writes when the affair has ended in what passes at the time as civilized and dignified mutual recognition of incompatability? In a world grown suddenly dull because the beloved, thank God, has gone, offering his killing and unpredictable and selfish affections elsewhere, you attempt to recapture, don’t you, the moments of significant pleasure—which may not have been mutual at all, but anyway existed. But this recapture is always impossible. You settle for the second-rate, you settle for the lesson you appear to have learned and forget the lesson you hoped to learn and might have learned, and so learn nothing at all, because the second-rate is the world’s common factor, and any damned fool people can teach it, any damned fool people can inherit it. "

― Paul Scott , The Jewel in the Crown

86 " 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. "

― Paul Scott , The Towers of Silence

88 " 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. "

― Paul Scott , The Jewel in the Crown

90 " 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, "

― Paul Scott , The Jewel in the Crown

92 " 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. "

― Paul Scott , The Jewel in the Crown

94 " 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. "

― Paul Scott , The Towers of Silence

96 " Picture her then: Daphne Manners, a big girl (to borrow a none too definite image from Lady Chatterjee) leaning on the balcony outside her bedroom window, gazing with concentration (as one might gaze for two people, one being absent, once deprived, since dead, and now regretted) at a landscape calculated to inspire in the most sympathetic western heart a degree of cultural shock. There is (even from this vantage point above a garden whose blooms will pleasurably convey scent if you bend close enough to them) a pervading redolence, wafting in from the silent, heat-stricken trembling plains; from the vast panorama of fields, from the river, from the complex of human dwellings (with here and there, spiky or bulbous, a church, a mosque, a temple), from the streets and lanes and the sequestered white bungalows, the private houses, the public buildings, the station, from the rear quarters of the MacGregor House. "

― Paul Scott , The Jewel in the Crown

98 " The India of the picture had never existed outside its gilt frame, and the emotions the picture was meant to conjure up were not much more than smugly pious. And yet now, as always, there was a feeling somewhere in it of shadowy dignity. It still stirred thoughts in her that she found difficult to analyze. 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

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

― Paul Scott , The Jewel in the Crown