Paul Scott Quotes

#1. English is the language of a people ho have probably earned their reputation for perfidy and hypocrisy because their language itself is so flexible, so often light-headed with with statements which appear to mean one thing one year and quite a different thing the next.

Paul Scott

#2. The calendar was a mathematical progression with arbitrary surprises.

Paul Scott

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

Paul Scott

#4. That MacGregor and Bibighar are the place of the white and the place of the black? To get from one to the other you could not cross by a bridge but had to your courage in your hands and enter the flood and let yourself be taken with it, lead where it may.

Paul Scott

#5. Speak what is in your mind,' Pandit Baba commanded. What insolence, Ahmed thought. There are two categories of things in my mind, he should say, the stuff people like you have fed into it and my own reactions to that stuff. The result is cancellation, so I have nothing in my mind.

Paul Scott

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

Paul Scott

#7. Imagination is not enough. Knowledge is necessary.

Paul Scott

#8. We need to be able to go to school and feel safe and accepted for who we are.

Paul Scott

#9. 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.

Paul Scott

#10. The past becomes a texture, an ambience to our present.

Paul Scott

#11. 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.

Paul Scott

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

Paul Scott

#13. 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.

Paul Scott

#14. 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.

Paul Scott

#15. 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

Paul Scott

#16. Kumar was a man who felt in the end he had lost everything, even his Englishness, and could then only meet every situation - even the most painful - in silence, in the hope that out of it he would dredge back up some self-respect.

Paul Scott