A Passage to India Quotes

Quote 1: "So abased, so monotonous is everything that meets the eye, that when the Ganges comes down it might be expected to wash the excrescence back into the soil. Houses do fall, people are drowned and left rotting, but the general outline of the town persists, welling here, shrinking there, like some low but indestructible form of life." Chapter 1, pg. 2

Quote 2: "On the second rise is laid out the little civil station, and viewed hence Chandrapore appears to be a totally different place. It is a city of gardens. It is no city, but a forest sparsely scattered with huts. It is a tropical pleasaunce washed by a noble river." Chapter 1, pg. 4

Quote 3: "They all become exactly the same, not worse, not better. I give any Englishman two years, be he Turton or Burton. It is only the difference of a letter. And I give any English woman six months. All are exactly alike." Chapter 2, pg. 7

Quote 4: "He has found out our dinner hour, that's all, and chooses to interrupt us every time, in order to show his power." Chapter 2, pg. 12

Quote 5: "A Mosque by winning his approval let loose his imagination. The temple of another creed, Hindu, Christian, or Greek, would have bored him and failed to awaken his sense of beauty. Here was Islam, his own country, more than a Faith, more than a battle cry, more, much more...Islam an attitude towards life both exquisite and durable, where his body and his thoughts found their home." Chapter 2, pg. 16

Quote 6: "That makes no difference. God is here." Chapter 2, pg. 16

Quote 7: "As he strolled down hill beneath the lovely moon, and again saw the lovely mosque, he seemed to own the land as much as anyone who owned it. What did it matter if a few flabby Hindus had preceded him there, and a few chilly English succeeded." Chapter 2, pg. 22

Quote 8: "I want to see the real India." Chapter 3, pg. 22

Quote 9: "Come on, India's not as bad as all that. Other side of the earth, if you like, but we stick to the same old moon." Chapter 3, pg. 23

Quote 10: "Adventures do occur, but not punctually." Chapter 3, pg. 22

Quote 11: "In England the moon had seemed dead and alien; here she was caught in the shawl of night together with earth and all other stars. A sudden sense of unity, of kinship with the heavenly bodies, passed into the old woman and out, like water through a tank, leaving a strange freshness behind." Chapter 3, pg. 28

Quote 12: "It is easy to sympathize at a distance. I value more the kind word that is spoken close to my ear." Chapter 4, pg. 35

Quote 13: "No, no, this is going to far. We must exclude someone from our gathering, or we shall be left with nothing." Chapter 4, pg. 38

Quote 14: "No, it was not picturesque; the East, abandoning its secular magnificence, was descending into a valley whose farther side no man can see." Chapter 5, pg. 39

Quote 15: "Because India is part of the earth. And God has put us on the earth in order to be pleasant to each other. God is love." Chapter 5, pg. 53

Quote 16: "[H]e did not realize that 'white' has no more to do with a colour than 'God save the King' with a god, and that it is the height of impropriety to consider what it does connote." Chapter 7, pg. 65

Quote 17: "A mystery is only a high sounding term for a muddle. No advantage in stirring it up, in either case. Aziz and I know well that India is a muddle." Chapter 7, pg. 73

Quote 18: "Aziz was exquisitely dressed, from tie-pin to spats, but he had forgotten his back-collar stud, and there you have the Indian all over; inattention to detail, the fundamental slackness that reveals the race." Chapter 8, pg. 87

Quote 19: "Her hand touched his, owing to a jolt, and one of the thrills so frequent in the animal kingdom passed between them, and announced that their difficulties were only a lovers' quarrel." Chapter 8, pg. 95

Quote 20: "And when the whole world behaves as such, there will be no more purdah?" Chapter 11, pg. 126

Quote 21: "But he [Aziz] himself was rooted in society and Islam. He belonged to a tradition, which bound him, and he had brought children into the world, the society of the future. Though he lived so vaguely in this flimsy bungalow, nevertheless he was placed, placed." Chapter 11, pg. 131

Quote 22: "All the love he felt for her at the Mosque welled up again, the fresher for forgetfulness." Chapter 13, pg. 145

Quote 23: "You keep your religion, I mine. That is best. Nothing embraces the whole of India, nothing, nothing and that was Akbar's mistake." Chapter 14, pg. 160

Quote 24: "But suddenly, at the edge of her mind, Religion appeared, poor little talkative Christianity, and she knew that all its divine words from 'Let there be light' to 'It is finished' only amounted to 'boum.'" Chapter 14, pg. 166

Quote 25: "'I have had twenty five years experience of this country'--and twenty five years seemed to fill the waiting room with their staleness and ungeneroisity--'and during those twenty five years, I have never known anything but disaster result when English people and Indians attempt to be intimate socially.'" Chapter 17, pg. 182

Quote 26: "They are not to blame, they have not a dog's chance--we should be like them if we settled here." Chapter 18, pg. 184

Quote 27: "They had started speaking of women and children, that phrase that exempts the male from sanity when it has been repeated a few times." Chapter 20, pg. 203

Quote 28: "But every humane act in the East is tainted with officialism, and while honoring him they condemned Aziz and India." Chapter 20, pg. 208

Quote 29: "The sound had spouted after her when she escaped, and was going on still like a river that gradually floods the plain. Only Mrs. Moore could drive it back to its source and seal the broken reservoir. Evil was loose...she could hear it entering the lives of others." Chapter 22, pg. 215

Quote 30: "Her Christian tenderness had gone, or had developed into hardness, a just irritation against the human race; she had taken no interest at the arrest, asked scarcely any questions, and had refused to leave her bed on one awful last night of Mohurram, when an attack was expected on the bungalow." Chapter 22, pg. 221

Quote 31: "As soon as she landed in India, it seemed to her good, and when she saw the water flowing through the mosque tank, or the Ganges, or the moon caught in the shawl of night with all the other stars, it seemed a beautiful goal and an easy one." Chapter 23, pg. 231

Quote 32: "by what right did they claim so much importance in the world and assume the title of civilization?" Chapter 24, pg. 242

Quote 33: "It was revolting to him [Ronny] to hear his mother travestied into Esmiss Esmoor, a Hindu goddess." Chapter 24, pg. 250

Quote 34: "Ronny's religion was of the sterilized Public School brand, which never goes bad, even in the tropics. Wherever he entered, mosque, cave or temple, he retained the spiritual outlook of the fifth form, and condemned as 'weakening' any attempt to understand them." Chapter 28, pg. 286

Quote 35: "The poem for Mr. Bhattacharya never got written, but it had an effect. It led him towards the vague and bulky figure of a mother-land. He was without natural affection for the land of his birth, but the Marabar Hills drove him to it. Half closing his eyes, he attempted to love India." Chapter 30, pg. 298

Quote 36: "Suspicion in the Oriental is a sort of malignant tumor, a mental malady, that makes him self-conscious and unfriendly suddenly; he trusts and mistrusts at the same time in a way the Westerner can not comprehend. It is his demon, as the Westerner's is hypocrisy." Chapter 32, pg. 311

Quote 37: "Thus Godbole, though she was not important to him, remembered an old woman he had met in Chandrapore days. Chance brought her into his mind while it was in this heated state, he did not select her, she happened to occur among the throng of soliciting images, a tiny splinter, and he impelled her by his spiritual force to that place where completeness can be found." Chapter33, pg. 321

Quote 38: "My heart is for my own people henceforward." Chapter 35, pg. 339

Quote 39: "Then you are an Oriental." Chapter 36, pg. 349

Quote 40: "But the horses didn't want it-they swerved apart; the earth didn't want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single file; the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they issued from the gap and saw Mau beneath: they didn't want it, they said in their hundred voices, 'No, not yet,' and the sky said, 'No, not there.'" Chapter 37, pg. 362