A Passage to India

by E.M. Forster

“What is to become of all our daughters if men refuse to marry? They will marry beneath them, or—”

There had been a “case” last year—an Indian gentleman had driven up to an official’s house and been turned back by the servants and told to approach more suitably—

Similar to obtaining a visa these days!!!

“As if one could avoid seeing them,” sighed Mrs Lesley. “I’ve avoided,” said Miss Quested. “Excepting my own servant, I’ve scarcely spoken to an Indian since landing.” “Oh, lucky you.”

No one can even begin to think of knowing this country until he has been in it twenty years.

In the light of her son’s comment she reconsidered the scene at the mosque, to see whose impression was correct.

Ah, how the impression changes overtime. So, it is always important to take other persons perspective when we are reaching/changing a coclusion.

no Indian animal has any sense of an interior.

Has she thought it through i.e. Is there any evidence of this or is it just out of total bias and sense of superiority.

“It is easy to sympathize at a distance,” said an old gentleman with a beard.

“Give, do not leave; after death who will thank you?”

“The great point to remember is that no one who’s here matters; those who matter don’t come. Isn’t that so, Mrs Turton?”

They notice everything, until they’re perfectly sure you’re their sort.”

Ronny approved of religion as long as it endorsed the National Anthem, but he objected when it attempted to influence his life.

She had died soon after he had fallen in love with her; he had not loved her at first. Touched by Western feeling, he disliked union with a woman whom he had never seen; moreover, when he did see her, she disappointed him, and he begat his first child in mere animality. The change began after its birth. He was won by her love for him, by a loyalty that implied something more than submission, and by her efforts to educate herself against that lifting of the purdah that would come in the next generation if not in theirs. She was intelligent, yet had old-fashioned grace. Gradually he lost the feeling that his relatives had chosen wrongly for him.

but had thought she could live in his mind, not realizing that the very fact that we have loved the dead increases their unreality, and that the more passionately we invoke them the further they recede.

“If one doesn’t worry, how’s one to understand?”

He was even tender to the English; he knew at the bottom of his heart that they could not help being so cold and odd and circulating like an ice-stream through his land.

You can make India in England apparently, just as you can make England in India.”

Sometimes, to the exasperation of Major Callendar, he would pass over the one relevant fact in a position, to dwell on the hundred irrelevant. The Major accused him of disingenuousness, and was roughly right, but only roughly. It was rather that a power he couldn’t control capriciously silenced his mind.

Presently the players went to bed, but not before other people had woken up elsewhere, people whose emotions they could not share, and whose existence they ignored.

a poem should touch the hearer with a sense of his own weakness, and should institute some comparison between mankind and flowers.