45 Quotes by Paul Scott

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

Independence is not something you can divide into phases. It exists or does not exist.

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.

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.

No flower is quite like another of the same species. On a single bush one is constantly surprised by the remarkable character shown by each individual rose. But from the house all one sees is a garden, which is all there is to it anyway in the long run.

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

I understood the connexion between his idea, and my idea that no one had any rights over me, that there wasn’t anyone I was answerable to except myself.

The permutations of English corruption in India were endless.

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.