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The Day of the Scorpion QUOTES

The Day of the Scorpion QUOTES

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

― Paul Scott , The Day of the Scorpion

22 " frightened people shriek the loudest and fire at random. "

― Paul Scott , The Day of the Scorpion

23 " 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. "

― Paul Scott , The Day of the Scorpion

24 " 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

25 " There is too much emotion in our own public life. The English could never be accused of that. They lock us up, release us and lock us up again according to what suits them at the time, with a bland detachment that, fortunately or unfortunately, is matched by an equally bland acceptance on our part. They act collectively, and so can afford detachment. We react individually, which weakens us. We haven’t yet acquired the collective instinct. The English send Kasim to prison. But it is Kasim who goes to prison. The prisoner in the zenana house is a man. But who is his jailer? The jailer is an idea. But in the prisoner the idea is embodied in a man. From his solitude the man reaches out to others. He writes to Sir George Malcolm. He writes to old Lady Manners. But he cannot reach them as people. They are protected from him by the collective instinct of their race. A reply comes, but it is not from them. It is from someone speaking for them. It has not been expedient for either of them to write. I understand in both cases why this should be. But to understand does not warm the heart. "

― Paul Scott , The Day of the Scorpion

26 " 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. "

― Paul Scott , The Day of the Scorpion

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

― Paul Scott , The Day of the Scorpion

28 " 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. * "

― Paul Scott , The Day of the Scorpion

29 " Upon retirement from the civil or the military some of them came to Pankot – not to die (although they did – and were buried in the churchyard of St John’s – C of E – or St Edward’s – RC) but to enjoy their remaining years in a place that was peculiarly Indian but very much their own, and where servants were cheap, and English flowers could be grown (sometimes spectacularly) in the gardens, and life take on the serenity of fulfilment, of duty done without the depression of going home wondering what it had been done for. "

― Paul Scott , The Day of the Scorpion

30 " 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. "

― Paul Scott , The Day of the Scorpion

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

― Paul Scott , The Day of the Scorpion

32 " A man like Panditji coud mesmerize you into submission, hypnotize you into regarding him as a source of spiritual comfort. It was undoubtedly his intention to try, and when you knew a man's intentions you were even more in danger of being subjected to them because to be aware of an intention somehow increased its force. I shall destroy you, one man might say to another; and at once he would have a confederate, the man himself. Ideas seemed to have a life, a power of their own. Men became slaves to them. To challenge an idea as an alternative to accepting it was to be no less a slave to it. Neither to accept nor challenge it was the most difficult thing of all; perhaps impossible. "

― Paul Scott , The Day of the Scorpion

33 " 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. "

― Paul Scott , The Day of the Scorpion