Paul Scott

“Are we not all creatures of chance?”

— Paul Scott

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

— Paul Scott

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

— Paul Scott

“frightened people shriek the loudest and fire at random.”

— Paul Scott

“Is not our capacity to laugh and cry the measure of our humanity?”

— Paul Scott

“How can people be punished when they are innocent?”

— Paul Scott

“Radical problems require radical solutions.”

— Paul Scott

“There’s nothing like a good downpour to cool people off.”

— Paul Scott

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

— Paul Scott

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

— Paul Scott

“Compulsively tidy people, one is told, are always wiping the slate clean, trying to give themselves what life denies all of us,…

— Paul Scott

“the exercise of authority was not an easy business, especially if those who exercised it no longer felt they had heaven on…

— Paul Scott

“If there are things you don’t know, you call the gap in your knowledge a mystery and fill it in with a…

— Paul Scott

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

— Paul Scott

“there being somewhere in this curious centuries-long association a kind of love with hate on the obverse side, as in a coin.”

— Paul Scott

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

— Paul Scott

“she felt there was between them an unexpected mutual confidence, confidence of the kind that could spring up between two strangers who…

— Paul Scott

“the unexpected side of a man’s personality is more memorable than the proof he may appear to give from time to time…

— Paul Scott

“I had that sensation which sometimes comes to us all, of returning to a situation that had already been resolved on some…

— Paul Scott

“I understood the connexion between his idea, and my idea that no one had any rights over me, that there wasn’t anyone…

— Paul Scott

“She did not divide conduct into parts. She was attempting always a wholeness. When there is wholeness there are no causes. Only…

— Paul Scott

“her father’s generation must be the last generation of English people who would have such a choice. War or no war, it…

— Paul Scott

English is the language of a people ho have probably earned their reputation for perfidy and hypocrisy because their language itself is…

— Paul Scott

“Speak what is in your mind,’ Pandit Baba commanded. What insolence, Ahmed thought. There are two categories of things in my mind,…

— Paul Scott

“She had devoted her life, in a practical and unimportant way, trying to prove that fear was evil because it promoted prejudice,…

— Paul Scott

“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…

— Paul Scott

“Upon retirement from the civil or the military some of them came to Pankot – not to die (although they did –…

— Paul Scott

“It was extraordinary, Ahmed thought, how men distinguished in one field – and he assumed that Pandit Baba Sahib was distinguished –…

— Paul Scott

“To be rejected—which I suppose is one of the easiest ways of making your mark, you have to come right out with…

— Paul Scott

“a repository sounds like a place for storing furniture when you bash off to some other station. I suppose an Englishman could…

— Paul Scott

“Well, life is not just a business of standing on dry land and occasionally getting your feet wet. It is merely an…

— Paul Scott

“English is not spare. But it is beautiful. It cannot be called truthful because its subtleties are infinite. It is the language…

— Paul Scott

“I have been thinking over what she said about knowing as distinct from remembering. Perhaps all it amounts to is that as…

— Paul Scott

“The India of the picture had never existed outside its gilt frame, and the emotions the picture was meant to conjure up…

— Paul Scott

“The writer encountered a Muslim woman once in a narrow street of a predominantly Hindu town, in the quarter inhabited by moneylenders.…

— Paul Scott

“Such a marvelous opportunity wasted. I mean for us, by us. Indians feel it too, don’t they? I mean, in spite of…

— Paul Scott

“The Jewel in Her Crown, which showed the old Queen (whose image the children now no doubt confused with the person of…

— Paul Scott

“No, my dear. Leave poor Hari Kumar to work out his own salvation, if he’s still alive to work it out and…

— Paul Scott

“You look at the English people you meet. Some of them you like. Some you hate. Many you are indifferent to. But…

— Paul Scott

“But it is not these things which most impress the stranger on his journey into the civil lines, into the old city…

— Paul Scott