Top 40 William Dalrymple Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “There is no fire in hell,” he reported. “Everyone who goes there brings their own fire, and their own pain, from this world.”

— William Dalrymple

2. “India has always had a strange way with her conquerors. In defeat, she beckons them in, then slowly seduces, assimilates and transforms them.”

— William Dalrymple

3. “What matters it, O breeze, If now has come the spring When I have lost them both The garden and my nest?”

— William Dalrymple

4. “To the sick man sweet water tastes bitter in the mouth.”

— William Dalrymple

5. “But it was the great temple of Sringeri that always received his most generous patronage, as a stash of correspondence discovered within the temple in the 1950s bears witness. Tipu put on record his horror at the damage done to the temple by a Maratha Pindari raiding party during a Maratha invasion of Mysore: ‘People who have sinned against such a holy place are sure to suffer the consequences of their misdeeds,’ wrote Tipu. ‘Those.”

— William Dalrymple

6. “Ultimately it was the East India Company, not the Marathas or the Sultans of Mysore, that the financiers across India decided to back.”

— William Dalrymple

7. “For me they go hand in hand. When I travel it makes me want to write, when I read it makes me want to travel.”

— William Dalrymple

8. “The histories of Islamic fundamentalism and European imperialism have very often been closely, and dangerously, intertwined. In a curious but very concrete way, the fundamentalists of both faiths have needed each other to reinforce each other’s prejudices and hatreds. The venom of one provides the lifeblood of the other.”

— William Dalrymple

9. “For all its faults we love this city.’ Then, after a pause, she added: ‘After all, we built it.”

— William Dalrymple

10. “Whoever has built a new city in Delhi has always lost it: the Pandava brethren, Prithviraj Chauhan, Feroz Shah Tughluk, Shah Jehan... They all built new cities and they all lost them. We were no exception.”

— William Dalrymple

11. “Partition was a total catastrophe for Delhi,’ she said. ‘Those who were left behind are in misery. Those who were uprooted are in misery. The Peace of Delhi is gone. Now it is all gone.”

— William Dalrymple

12. “For the British after 1857, the Indian Muslim became an almost subhuman creature, to be classified in unembarrassedly racist imperial literature alongside such other despised and subject specimens, such as Irish Catholics or ‘the Wandering Jew’.”

— William Dalrymple

13. “According to the Puranas, the Kali Yug is the last age before the world is destroyed by the ‘fire of one thousand suns’, after which the cycle reaches its conclusion and time momentarily stops, before the wheel turns again and a new cycle begins. Rather.”

— William Dalrymple

14. “The water moves on, a little faster than before, yet still the great river flows. It is as fluid and unpredictable in its moods as it has ever been, but it meanders within familiar banks.”

— William Dalrymple

15. “Delhi was once a paradise, Where Love held sway and reigned; But its charm lies ravished now And only ruins remain. No.”

— William Dalrymple

16. “Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned, they therefore do as they like. Edward, First Baron Thurlow.”

— William Dalrymple

17. “But on balance I think you must never take land away from a people. A people’s land has a mystique. You can go and possibly order them about for a bit, perhaps introduce some new ideas, build a few good buildings, but then in the end you must go away and die in Cheltenham.’ Iris sighed. ‘And that, of course, is exactly what we did.”

— William Dalrymple

18. “India’s transition to colonialism took place under a for-profit corporation, which existed entirely for the purpose of enriching its investors.”

— William Dalrymple

19. “But Khair did not need such proof of her husband’s love for her. Over and over again, James had risked everything for her. Most reationshps in life can survive – or not – without being put to any real crucial, fundamental test. It was James’s fate for his love to be tested not once, but four times... At each stage he could easily have washed his hands off his teenage lover. Each time he chose to remain true to her. That, not the words of any will, was the evidence she could cling to.”

— William Dalrymple

20. “The Tughluks have gone; Tughlukabad is a ruin; only Nizamuddin remains.”

— William Dalrymple

21. “It was as if this early promiscuous mingling of races and ideas, modes of dress and ways of living, was something that was on no one’s agenda and suited nobody’s version of events. All sides seemed, for different reasons, to be slightly embarrassed by this moment of crossover, which they preferred to pretend had never happened. It is, after all, always easier to see things in black and white.”

— William Dalrymple

22. “What you say is true,’ said Fr. Dioscuros with a smile. ‘You can pray anywhere. After all, God is everywhere, so you can find him everywhere.’ He gestured to the darkening sand dunes outside: ‘But in the desert, in the pure clean atmosphere, in the silence – there you can find yourself. And unless you begin to know yourself, how can you even begin to search for God?”

— William Dalrymple

23. “Dr Jaffery said that very few people in Delhi now wanted to study classical Persian, the language which, like French in Imperial Russia, had for centuries been the first tongue of every educated Delhi-wallah. ‘No one has any interest in the classics today,’ he said. ‘If they read at all, they read trash from America. They have no idea what they are missing. The jackal thinks he has feasted on the buffalo when in fact he has just eaten the eyes, entrails and testicles rejected by the lion.”

— William Dalrymple

24. “So vast is India, and so uniquely resilient and deeply rooted are her intertwined social and religious institutions, that all foreign intruders are sooner or later either shaken off or absorbed.”

— William Dalrymple

25. “Her conclusion was that the Mughal state was unusually extractive and appropriated 56.7 per cent of the total produce. Her research focused on five north Indian provinces: Agra, Delhi, Lahore, Allahabad and Avadh. The total.”

— William Dalrymple

26. “The master of Delhi, they knew, was always the master of Hindustan.”

— William Dalrymple

27. “Such are the humiliations of the travel writer in the late 20th century: go to the ends of the earth to search for the most exotic heretics in the world, and you will find that they have cornered the kebab business at the end of your street in London.”

— William Dalrymple

28. “Finally, at two minutes to three, in the sweltering heat of a Mesopotamian summer afternoon, I crossed the no-man’s land into Syria.”

— William Dalrymple

29. “Then we were both lectured by our guruji. He told us clearly what was expected of us: never again to use a vehicle, to take food only once a day, not to use Western medicine, to abstain from emotion, never to hurt any living creature. He told us we must not react to attacks, must not beg, must not cry, must not complain, must not demand, must not feel superiority, must learn not to be disturbed by illusory things.”

— William Dalrymple

30. “He disdains such cowardly acts as looking in wing mirrors or using his indicators. His Ambassador is his chariot, his klaxon his sword. Weaving into the oncoming traffic, playing ‘chicken’ with the other taxis, Balvinder Singh is a Raja of the Road.”

— William Dalrymple

31. “So removed had the British now become from their Indian subjects, and so dismissive were they of Indian opinion, that they had lost all ability to read the omens around them or to analyse their own position with any degree of accuracy. Arrogance and imperial self-confidence had diminished the desire to seek accurate information or gain any real knowledge of the state of the country.”

— William Dalrymple

32. “His diaries had begun to assume something of the knowingness of incipient middle age; at times, indeed, he was in danger of becoming priggish and opinionated. As with many later European voyagers, travel in this part of the world, far from broadening the mind, seemed instead to lead to a blanket distrust of anyone of a different creed, colour or class.”

— William Dalrymple

33. “He is a thinker,’ wrote Jacquemont in his memoir, ’who finds nothing but solitude in that exchange of words without ideas which is dignified by the name of conversation in the society of this land.”

— William Dalrymple

34. “For two thousand years Jerusalem has brought out the least attractive qualities in every race that has lived there. The Holy City has had more atrocities committed in it, more consistently, than any other town in the world. Sacred to three religions, the city has witnessed the worst intolerance and self-righteousness of all of them.”

— William Dalrymple

35. “To subdue and crush the masses of a nation by military force, when all are unanimous in the determination to be free, is to attempt the imprisonment of a whole people; all such projects must be temporary and transient, and terminate in a catastrophe...”

— William Dalrymple

36. “He was holding a tray. On the tray were two glasses of milky Indian chai. ‘Chota hazari, sahib,’ said Ladoo. Bed tea. ‘What a nice gesture,’ I said returning to Olivia. ‘Mrs Puri has sent us up some tea.’ ‘I wish she had sent it up two hours later,’ said Olivia from beneath her sheets.”

— William Dalrymple

37. “The outbreak revealed the surprising degree to which the Mughal court was still regarded across northern India not as some sort of foreign Muslim imposition – as some, especially on the Hindu right wing, look upon the Mughals today – but instead as the principal source of political legitimacy, and therefore the natural centre of resistance against British colonial rule.”

— William Dalrymple

38. “He disdains such cowardly acts as looking in wing mirrors or using his indicators.”

— William Dalrymple

39. “And it would be nice if the roof was a bit stronger. Then the peacocks wouldn’t keep falling through. I don’t mind during the day, but I hate waking up at night to find a peacock in bed with me.”

— William Dalrymple

40. “On the road, as in many other aspects of Indian life, Might is Right.”

— William Dalrymple

41. “During our first month in the flat, however, Mr Puri was on his best behaviour. Apart from twice proposing marriage to my wife, he behaved with perfect decorum.”

— William Dalrymple

42. “On another occasion, when a party of two hundred Muslims turned up at the Palace demanding to be allowed to slaughter cows – holy to Hindus – at ‘Id, Zafar told them in a ‘decided and angry tone that the religion of the Musalmen did not depend upon the sacrifice of cows’.”

— William Dalrymple

43. “This? I thought, after a twenty-year civil war: This? Armageddon I expected; but Armani I did not.”

— William Dalrymple

44. “It is as if the Victorians succeeded in colonising not only India but also, more permanently, our imaginations, to the exclusion of all other images of the Indo – British encounter.”

— William Dalrymple

45. “Mongols were uneducated tribesmen who believed in enjoying life’s simpler pleasures. Ghengis Khan expressed their philosophy most succinctly. ‘Happiness,’ he is recorded to have said, ’lies in conquering one’s enemies, driving them in front of oneself, in taking their property, in savouring their despair, in outraging their wives and daughters.”

— William Dalrymple

46. “Love within my being. You lived with me, breath of my breath, Being in my being, nor left my side; But now the wheel of Time has turned And you are gone – no joys abide. You.”

— William Dalrymple

47. “The body is the true temple, the true mosque, the true church.”

— William Dalrymple

48. “Although a Bahadur Shah Zafar road still survives in Delhi, as indeed do roads named after all the other Great Mughals, for many Indians today, rightly or wrongly, the Mughals are still perceived as it suited the British to portray them in the imperial propaganda that they taught in Indian schools after 1857: as sensual, decadent, temple-destroying invaders – something that was forcefully and depressingly demonstrated by the whole episode of the demoliton of the Baburi Masjid at Ayodhya in 1992.”

— William Dalrymple

49. “From this point of view, Zafar could certainly be tried as a defeated enemy king; but he had never been a subject, and so could not possibly be called a rebel guilty of treason. Instead, from a legal point of view, a good case could be made that it was the East India Company which was the real rebel, guilty of revolt against a feudal superior to whom it had sworn allegiance for nearly a century.”

— William Dalrymple