Top 35 Paul Scott Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Paul Scott

2. “The past becomes a texture, an ambience to our present.”

— Paul Scott

3. “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

4. “Imagination is not enough. Knowledge is necessary.”

— Paul Scott

5. “Blessed are the insulted and the shat upon,’ Barbie said. ‘For they shall inherit the kingdom of Heaven, which is currently under offer with vacant possession.”

— Paul Scott

6. “The structure of a friendship is seldom submitted to analysis until it comes under pressure;.”

— Paul Scott

7. “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

8. “Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not. The same particle does not rise from the valley to the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons who make up a nation today, next year die, and their experience with them.”

— Paul Scott

9. “Deny people something they want, over a longish period, and they naturally start disagreeing about precisely what it is they do want.”

— Paul Scott

10. “Well, life is not just a business of standing on dry land and occasionally getting your feet wet. It is merely an illusion that some of us stand on one bank and some on the opposite. So long as we stand like that we are not living at all, but dreaming. So jump, jump in, and let the shock wake us up. Even if we drown, at least for a moment or two before we die we shall be awake and alive.”

— Paul Scott

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

— Paul Scott

12. “He said history was a sum of situations whose significance was never seen until long afterwards because people had been afraid to act them out. They couldn’t face up to their responsibility for them. They preferred to think of the situations they found themselves in as part of a general drift of events they had no control over, which meant that they never really understood those situations, and so in a curious way the situations did become part of a general drift of events.”

— Paul Scott

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

— Paul Scott

14. “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

15. “Walls, windows, roof, verandah–entirely commonplace, mean even–moved her with the austere poetry of their function. Here a man sheltered from and diminished the horror and vulgarity of the world by the simplicity of his arrangements for living in it.”

— Paul Scott

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

— Paul Scott

17. “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.”

— Paul Scott

18. “She had to make her own marvelous mistakes.”

— Paul Scott

19. “It is said that he spoke the language of the greased palm, and this language is international.”

— Paul Scott

20. “What a lot you know.’ I laughed and said it was one of the few advantages of old age, to be a repository of bits and pieces of casual information that sometimes come in useful. But she said she didn’t really mean that, she meant know as distinct from remember.”

— Paul Scott

21. “The world rolls: the circumstances vary every hour. All the angels that inhabit this temple of the body appear at the windows, and all the gnomes and vices also. By all the virtues they are united. If there be virtue, all the vices are known as such; they confess and flee.”

— Paul Scott

22. “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

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

— Paul Scott

24. “One always saw and sees through pretense.”

— Paul Scott

25. “If God is never happy what chance of happiness is there for us?”

— Paul Scott

26. “The permutations of English corruption in India were endless.”

— Paul Scott

27. “I had that sensation which sometimes comes to us all, of returning to a situation that had already been resolved on some previous occasion, of being again committed to a tragic course of action, having learned nothing from that other time or those other times.”

— Paul Scott

28. “The twin rivulets gleamed on his prison cheeks, and then the image became blurred and she felt a corresponding wetness on her own – tears for Daphne that were also tears for him; for lovers who could never be described as star-crossed because they had had no stars. For them heaven had drawn an implacable band of dark across its constellations and the dark was lit by nothing except the trust they had had in each other not to tell the truth because the truth had seemed too dangerous to tell.”

— Paul Scott

29. “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

30. “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.”

— Paul Scott

31. “In such a fashion human beings call for explanations of the things that happen to them and in such a way scenes and characters are set for exploration, like toys set out by kneeling children intent on pursuing their grim but necessary games.”

— Paul Scott

32. “There are images that stay vividly in your mind, even after many years: images coupled with the feeling that at the same time came to you. Sometimes you can know that such an image has been selected to stay with you forever out of the hundreds you every day encounter.”

— Paul Scott

33. “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.”

— Paul Scott

34. “I am an old man. I am entitled, am I not, to say what I think? – and of course to stray from the point.”

— Paul Scott

35. “It was extraordinary, Ahmed thought, how men distinguished in one field – and he assumed that Pandit Baba Sahib was distinguished – seemed to claim for themselves wisdom in all spheres of human activity; wisdom and the right to make pronouncements which they expected you to listen to and learn from.”

— Paul Scott

36. “Even when I’m not looking for a meaning one springs naturally to my mind. Do you think it is a disease?”

— Paul Scott

37. “Perron did not clearly hear what Ahmed said, but it sounded like, ‘It seems to be me they want.”

— Paul Scott

38. “It’s an Anglo-Saxon failing, I suppose. Constantly we want proof, here and now, proof of our existence, of the mark we’ve made, the sort of mark we can wear round our necks, to label us, to make sure we’re never lost in that awful dark jungle of anonymity.”

— Paul Scott