The Towers of Silence Quotes

“The calendar was a mathematical progression with arbitrary surprises.”
― Paul Scott, The Towers of Silence

“As children we accept magic as a normal part of life. Everything seems rooted in it, everything conspires in magic terms.”
― Paul Scott, The Towers of Silence

“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, The Towers of Silence

“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, The Towers of Silence

“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, The Towers of Silence

“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, The Towers of Silence

“He was twenty-five but had that elongated bony English look of not yet having completed the process of growing-up and filling out which meant in a few years he would suddenly appear middle-aged as well as beefy because to men like this everything seemed to happen at once round about the age of thirty; everything except white hair which was reserved for retirement and was equally sudden and the only sign that old age had arrived.”
― Paul Scott, The Towers of Silence

“Her attitude to the girls became that of an aunt who knew her nieces had heard her discussed unfavorably but could not help showing her interest in them and some of her affection.Indeed she seemedm to acquire something of the thick skin such a woman had to cultivate if her feelings were not to be constantly hurt by inattention to her questions, opinions, and fund of boring anecdotes.”
― Paul Scott, The Towers of Silence

“She had had a good life. It had its comic elements. Its scattered relics had not been and now can never all be retrieved; but some of them were blessed by the good intentions that created them.”
― Paul Scott, The Towers of Silence

“the one thing to which the human spirit could always accommodate itself was chaos and misfortune.”
― Paul Scott, The Towers of Silence

“When he got to the shoe putting-on stage he called Hosain again. Putting on and taking off his own shoes and boots were activities at which he drew the line if there was a man available to perform these services. He had learned to draw the line in Muzzafirabad where his first CO, Colonel Gawstone, advised him never to stoop if he could help it. The climate wasn't right for it. Mrs. Gawstone had stooped to pick up a glove and keeled right over and never got up. They had buried her the next day.”
― Paul Scott, The Towers of Silence

“The world exists for the education of each man. There is no age or state of society, or mode of action in history, to which there is not somewhat corresponding in his life. Everything tends in a most wonderful manner to abbreviate itself and yield its own virtue to him. He should see that he can live all history in his own person. He must sit at home with might and main, and not suffer himself to be bullied by kings or empires, but know that he is greater than all the geography and all the governments of the world . . .”
― Paul Scott, The Towers of Silence