The Jewel in the Crown Quotes

“English is not spare. But it is beautiful. It cannot be called truthful because its subtleties are infinite. It is the language of a people who have probably earned their reputation for perfidy and hypocrisy because their language itself is so flexible, so often light-headed with statements which appear to mean one thing one year and quite a different thing the next.”
― Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown

“Rumours began with the whispered gossip of native servants and spread quickly to the rest of the population.”
― Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown

“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, The Jewel in the Crown

“There’s a difference between trying to stop an injustice and obstructing justice.”
― Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown

“One always saw and sees through pretense.”
― Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown

“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, The Jewel in the Crown

“How can people be punished when they are innocent?”
― Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown

“Deny people something they want, over a longish period, and they naturally start disagreeing about precisely what it is they do want.”
― Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown

“When you spoke to her there wasn’t any mystery. In herself she was all the explanation I felt she needed. And that is rare, isn’t it? To be explained by yourself, by what you are and what you do, and not by what you’ve done, or were, or by what people think you might be or might become.”
― Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown

“the unexpected side of a man’s personality is more memorable than the proof he may appear to give from time to time that he is unchanged, unchangeable.”
― Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown

“The structure of a friendship is seldom submitted to analysis until it comes under pressure;”
― Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown

“It is said that he spoke the language of the greased palm, and this language is international.”
― Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown

“in this life, living, there is no dignity except perhaps in laughter.”
― Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown

“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, The Jewel in the Crown

“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, The Jewel in the Crown

“She had to make her own marvelous mistakes.”
― Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown

“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, The Jewel in the Crown

“For years, since the eighteenth century, and in each century since, we have said at home, in England, in Whitehall, that the day would come when our rule in India will end, not bloodily, but in peace, in—so we made it seem—a perfect gesture of equality and friendship and love. For years, for nearly a century, the books that Indians have read have been the books of our English radicals, our English liberals. There has been, you see, a seed. A seed planted in the Indian imagination and in the English imagination. Out of it was to come something sane and grave, full of dignity, full of thoughtfulness and kindness and peace and wisdom. For all these qualities are in us, in you, and in me, in old Joseph and Mr. Narayan and Mr. White and I suppose in Brigadier Reid. And they were there too, in Mr. Chaudhuri. For years we have been promising and for years finding means of putting the fulfilment of the promise off until the promise stopped looking like a promise and started looking only like a sinister prevarication, even to me, let alone to Indians who think and feel and know the same as me. And the tragedy is that between us there is this little matter of the colour of the skin, which gets in the way of our seeing through each other’s failings and seeing into each other’s hearts. Because if we saw through them, into them, then we should know. And what we should know is that the promise is a promise and will be fulfilled.” But”
― Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown

“Even when I'm not looking for a meaning one springs naturally to my mind. Do you think it is a disease?”
― Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown

“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, The Jewel in the Crown

“she had this look of calmness, of concentration, the look, I think, of all women who for the first time are with child and find that the world around them has become relatively unimportant.”
― Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown

“Romesh Chand was a man who did not believe in telephones, in the necessity for telephones,”
― Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown

“If God is never happy what chance of happiness is there for us?”
― Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown

“There’s nothing like a good downpour to cool people off.”
― Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown

“the exercise of authority was not an easy business, especially if those who exercised it no longer felt they had heaven on their side. That”
― Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown

“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, The Jewel in the Crown

“And for Miss Crane there was something else besides, a feeling she had often had before, a feeling in the bones of her shoulders and the base of her skull that she was about to go over the hump thirty-five years of effort and willingness had never got her over; the hump, however high or low it was, which, however hard you tried, still lay in the path of thoughts you sent flowing out to a man or woman whose skin was a different color from your own. Were it only the size of a pebble, the hump was always there, disrupting the purity of that flow, the purity of the thoughts.”
― Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown

“we wonder what the fuss was about and aren’t sure that our own government is doing any better, or even that it is a government that represents us. It seems more to be the government of an uneasy marriage between old orthodoxy and old revolutionaries, and such people have nothing to say to us that we want to hear.”
― Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown

“hit a man in the face long enough and he turns for help to his racial memory and tribal gods.”
― Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown

“Here, on the ground, nothing is likely, everything possible.”
― Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown