A Division of the Spoils Quotes

“An emigration is possibly the loneliest experience a man can suffer. In a way it is not a country he has lost but a home, or even just a part of a home, a room perhaps, or something in that room that he has had to leave behind, and which haunts him. I remember a window-seat I used to sit in as a youth, reading Pushkin and teaching myself to smoke scented cigarettes. That window is one I am always knocking at, asking to be let in.”
― Paul Scott, A Division of the Spoils

“Perron did not clearly hear what Ahmed said, but it sounded like, ‘It seems to be me they want.”
― Paul Scott, A Division of the Spoils

“optimist. Scratch a little deeper and you will no doubt uncover a great intriguer, but I hope a well-intentioned one. Scratch deeper still, never minding the blood, and perhaps you will find an old White Russian of liberal sympathies but intent even now on rescuing his Tsar from the cellar in Ekaterinburg, or failing his Tsar, the little Tsarevich.”
― Paul Scott, A Division of the Spoils

“The world rolls: the circumstances vary every hour. All the angels that inhabit this temple of the body appear at the windows, and all the gnomes and vices also. By all the virtues they are united. If there be virtue, all the vices are known as such; they confess and flee.”
― Paul Scott, A Division of the Spoils

“The victim chose neither the time nor the place of his death but in going to it as he did he must have seen that he contributed something of his own to its manner; and this was probably his compensation; so that when the body falls it will seem to do so without protest and without asking for any explanation of the thing that has happened to it, as if all that has gone before is explanation enough, so that it will not fall to the ground so much as out of a history which began with a girl stumbling on steps at the end of a long journey through the dark.”
― Paul Scott, A Division of the Spoils

“Perron had become interested in the effects of tropical environment on temper and character. At home Purvis might well have been, as he had intimated, the most mild-mannered and considerate of men. Of strong constitution himself, Perron- who had not maintained his heath in India without an almost valetudinarian attention to the medicinal needs of his body- had even so not been free of the shortness of temper that was one of the side-effects of an overworked and easily discouraged digestive system. The insight this had given him into the possibly important part played in Anglo-Indian history by an incipient, intermittent or chronic diarrhoea in the bowels of the RAJ was one of the few definite academic advantages he felt he had gained by coming to India.”
― Paul Scott, A Division of the Spoils

“Everything means something to you; dying flowers, The different times of year. The new clothes you wear at the end of Ramadan. A prince’s trust. The way that water flows, Too impetuous to pause, breaking over Stones, rushing towards distant objects, Places you can’t see but which you also flow Outward to. Today you slept long. When you woke your old blood stirred. This too meant something. The girl who woke you Touched your brow. She called you Lord. You smiled, Put up a trembling hand. But she had gone, As seasons go, as a night-flower closes in the day, As a hawk flies into the sun or as the cheetah runs; as The deer pauses, sun-dappled in long grass, But does not stay. Fleeting moments: these are held a long time in the eye, The blind eye of the ageing poet, So that even you, Gaffur, can imagine In this darkening landscape The bowman lovingly choosing his arrow, The hawk outpacing the cheetah, (The fountain splashing lazily in the courtyard), The girl running with the deer.”
― Paul Scott, A Division of the Spoils

“I walk home, thinking of another place, of seemingly long endless summers and the shade of different kinds of trees; and then of winters when the branches of the trees were bare, so bare that, recalling them now, it seems inconceivable to me that I looked at them and did not think of the summer just gone, and the spring soon to come, as illusions; as dreams, never fulfilled, never to be fulfilled.’ Philoctetes.”
― Paul Scott, A Division of the Spoils

“A smell of old incense permeated the fabrics of the covers and cushions of an immense divan such as might have been used by court-musicians. One fancied that dust rose from it, gently enveloping us in a dry benevolent mist in which hung minute particles of the leaves and petals of garlands of flowers: jasmine, roses, frangipani and marigold, and all the names of Allah. One observer: a mouse. Are you afraid? I asked. No,”
― Paul Scott, A Division of the Spoils

“Rejected seed of a diseased pig-eater,’ I began. ‘Despised dropping from a dead vulture’s crutch. Eater of sweeper’s turds and feeder on after-birth. Fart in the holy silence of the universe and limp pudenda on the body of the false prophet.”
― Paul Scott, A Division of the Spoils

“I do not love thee, Dr Fell, the reason why I cannot tell.”
― Paul Scott, A Division of the Spoils

“a fellow prisoner-of-war, a Catholic, who had shocked a padre by confessing that he had always wondered what after spending six days creating the world and then resting on the seventh God had done on the eighth.”
― Paul Scott, A Division of the Spoils

“there is nothing more gullible in the whole animal world than a human being? One has this hysterical belief in the non-recurrence of the abysmal, I suppose. One always imagines one has reached the nadir and that the only possible next move is up and out.”
― Paul Scott, A Division of the Spoils