The Day of the Scorpion Quotes

“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, The Day of the Scorpion

“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, The Day of the Scorpion

“Incidentally, I do not agree with you when you speak of Indian independence having become a foregone conclusion. Independence is not something you can divide into phases. It exists or does not exist. Certain steps might be taken to help bring it into existence, others can be taken that will hinder it doing so. But independence alone is not the idea I pursue, nor the idea which the party I belong to tries to pursue, no doubt making many errors and misjudgements in the process. The idea, you know, isn’t simply to get rid of the British. It is to create a nation capable of getting rid of them and capable simultaneously of taking its place in the world as a nation, and we know that every internal division of our interests hinders the creation of such a nation. That is why we go on insisting that the Congress is an All India Congress. It is an All India Congress first, because you cannot detach from it the idea that it is right that it should be. Only second is it a political party, although one day that is what it must become. Meanwhile, Governor-ji, we try to do the job that your Government has always found it beneficial to leave undone, the job of unifying India, of making all Indians feel that they are, above all else, Indians. You think perhaps we do this to put up a strong front against the British. Partly only you would be right. Principally we do it for the sake of India when you are gone. And we are working mostly in the dark with only a small glimmer of light ahead, because we have never had that kind of India, we do not know what kind of India that will be. This is why I say we are looking for a country. I can look for it better in prison, I’m afraid, than from a seat on your Excellency’s executive council.”
― Paul Scott, The Day of the Scorpion

“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, The Day of the Scorpion

“The permutations of English corruption in India were endless”
― Paul Scott, The Day of the Scorpion

“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, The Day of the Scorpion

“Independence is not something you can divide into phases. It exists or does not exist.”
― Paul Scott, The Day of the Scorpion

“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, The Day of the Scorpion

“the people in this country who feel most like foreigners to each other are English people who’ve just arrived and the ones who have been here for several years.”
― Paul Scott, The Day of the Scorpion

“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, The Day of the Scorpion

“You look at the English people you meet. Some of them you like. Some you hate. Many you are indifferent to. But even the ones you like do not matter. The ones who matter you will never see – they are tucked away in England – and they are indifferent to us as individuals. You think these officials over here rule us? These viceroys, these governors, these commissioners and commanders-in-chief and brigadier-generals? Then you are wrong. We are ruled by people who do not even know where Ranpur is. But now they know where Jallianwallah Bagh is and what it is, and many of them do not like what they know. Those of them who do like what they know are the ones you hear about and hear from. Like the General at Amritsar they are frightened people and frightened people shriek the loudest and fire at random.”
― Paul Scott, The Day of the Scorpion

“Look, it’s the same color as mine. Don’t be fooled by that. People are. But prick an imbecile and he’ll bleed crimson. So will a dog.”
― Paul Scott, The Day of the Scorpion

“A man like Panditji coud mesmerize you into submission, hypnotize you into regarding him as a source of spiritual comfort. It was undoubtedly his intention to try, and when you knew a man's intentions you were even more in danger of being subjected to them because to be aware of an intention somehow increased its force. I shall destroy you, one man might say to another; and at once he would have a confederate, the man himself. Ideas seemed to have a life, a power of their own. Men became slaves to them. To challenge an idea as an alternative to accepting it was to be no less a slave to it. Neither to accept nor challenge it was the most difficult thing of all; perhaps impossible.”
― Paul Scott, The Day of the Scorpion

“I do not, she thought, no I do not, give a damn. The Furies were riding across an uninhabited sky, to their own and no one else’s destruction.”
― Paul Scott, The Day of the Scorpion

“The sweet indifference of man’s environment to his problems. Pathetic fallacy or no, I really felt it, an indifference to us that amounted to contempt.”
― Paul Scott, The Day of the Scorpion

“Ah, oui, pauvre papillon. C’est un de mes prisonniers”
― Paul Scott, The Day of the Scorpion

“The permutations of English corruption in India were endless – affection for servants, for peasants, for soldiers, pretence at understanding the Indian intellectual or at sympathizing with nationalist aspirations, but all this affection and understanding was a corruption of what he called the calm purity of their contempt.”
― Paul Scott, The Day of the Scorpion

“The existence of well-to-do little neutral countries is a pointer to what global war is really all about,”
― Paul Scott, The Day of the Scorpion

“She felt the curious flattening of inquiring spirit the traveller suffers from, knowing himself without occupation or investment in the fortunes of a strange city.”
― Paul Scott, The Day of the Scorpion

“If there are things you don’t know, you call the gap in your knowledge a mystery and fill it in with a wholly emotional answer.”
― Paul Scott, The Day of the Scorpion

“But it isn’t the best we should remember,’ she said, and shocked herself by speaking aloud, and clutched the folds and mother-of-pearl buttons in that habitual gesture. We must remember the worst because the worst is the lives we lead, the best is only our history, and between our history and our lives there is this vast dark plain where the rapt and patient shepherds drive their invisible flocks in expectation of God’s forgiveness. *”
― Paul Scott, The Day of the Scorpion

“Compulsively tidy people, one is told, are always wiping the slate clean, trying to give themselves what life denies all of us, a fresh start.”
― Paul Scott, The Day of the Scorpion

“wily minds and cold hearts were the combination Bronowsky found most common in English administrators.”
― Paul Scott, The Day of the Scorpion

“her father’s generation must be the last generation of English people who would have such a choice. War or no war, it was all coming to an end, and the end could not come neatly. There would be people who had to be victims of the fact that it could not. She herself was surely one of them,”
― Paul Scott, The Day of the Scorpion

“frightened people shriek the loudest and fire at random.”
― Paul Scott, The Day of the Scorpion

“It is only an insincere people that can be accused of hypocrisy.”
― Paul Scott, The Day of the Scorpion

“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, The Day of the Scorpion

“Speak what is in your mind,’ Pandit Baba commanded. What insolence, Ahmed thought. There are two categories of things in my mind, he should say, the stuff people like you have fed into it and my own reactions to that stuff. The result is cancellation, so I have nothing in my mind.”
― Paul Scott, The Day of the Scorpion

“Upon retirement from the civil or the military some of them came to Pankot – not to die (although they did – and were buried in the churchyard of St John’s – C of E – or St Edward’s – RC) but to enjoy their remaining years in a place that was peculiarly Indian but very much their own, and where servants were cheap, and English flowers could be grown (sometimes spectacularly) in the gardens, and life take on the serenity of fulfilment, of duty done without the depression of going home wondering what it had been done for.”
― Paul Scott, The Day of the Scorpion

“I have been thinking over what she said about knowing as distinct from remembering. Perhaps all it amounts to is that as we talked and I trotted out these little bits of information I gave the impression, common in elderly people, not only of having a long full life behind me that I could dip into more or less at random for the benefit of a younger listener, but also of being undisturbed by any doubts about the meaning and value of that life and the opinions I’d formed while leading it; although that suggests knowingness, and when she said, ‘What a lot you know’ she made it sound like a state of grace, one that she envied me in the mistaken belief that I was in it, while she was not and didn’t understand how, things being as she finds them, one ever achieved it.”
― Paul Scott, The Day of the Scorpion