J.G. Farrell Quotes

The Major only glanced at the newspaper these days, tired of trying to comprehend a situation which defied comprehension, a war without battles or trenches.

A great deal of thought must be given to your daughter's marriage. Otherwise, she will simply slink off like a cat on a dark night to be fertilized under a bush to God knows whom!

But now the giant heads of Plato and Socrates, each with an expression of penetrating wisdom carved on his white features, surveyed the river and the melon beds beyond.

And everyone would climb the stairs chuckling to their rooms and dream of aces and knaves and a supply of trumps that would last for ever and ever, one trump after another, an invincible superiority subject to neither change nor decay nor old age, for a trump will always be a trump, come what may.

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How few human beings, the major thought with a sigh, can exert by hard work, thrift, intelligence or any other virtue the slightest influence on their own destiny.

It seems that's there a ghastly Darwinian principle of economics known as the Law of Substitution which declares, more or less, that "the cheapest will survive". This has all sorts of unpleasant consequences, one of which is that non-economic values tend to be eliminated.

The Magistrate suffered from the disability of a free-thinking turn of mind and from a life that was barren and dreary to match.

For a day or two Fleury became quite active. He had his book about the advance of civilization in India to consider and this was one reason why he had taken an interest in the behaviour of the Collector. He asked a great number of questions and even bought a notebook to record pertinent information.
"Why, if the Indian people are happier under our rule," he asked a Treasury official, "do they not emigrate from those native states like Hyderabad which are so dreadfully misgoverned and come and live in
British India?"
"The apathy of the native is well known," replied the official stiffly. "He is not enterprising."
Fleury wrote down "apathy" in a flowery hand and then, after a moment's hesitation, added "not enterprising".

The human situation, in general or in particular, is slightly worse (ignoring an occasional hiccup in the graph) at any given moment than at any preceding moment.

He remembered declaring that he would come back to her, but not very much else.

Not everyone, the Collector was aware, is improved by the job he does in life; some people are visibly disimproved.

If you were adventurous, scoop out the fragrant, heavenly, alarming flesh of the durian.

And as he dug, he wept. He saw Hari's animated face, and numberless dead men, and the hatred on the faces of the sepoys . . . and it suddenly seemed to him that he could see clearly the basis of all conflict and misery, something mysterious which grows in men at the same time as hair and teeth and brains
and which reveals its presence by the utter and atrocious inflexibility of all human habits and beliefs, even including his own.

War is only a passing phase in business life ... If you want my opinion there's nothing like a spot of patriotism for blinding people to reality.

We look on past ages with condescension, as a mere preparation for us ... but what if we are a mere after-glow of them?

[P]eople are insubstantial. They never last. All this fuss, it's all fuss about nothing. We're here for a while and then we're gone. People are insubstantial. They never last at all.

Why do people insist on defending their ideas and opinions with such ferocity, as if defending honour itself? What could be easier to change than an idea?

What an advantage that knowledge can be stored in books! The knowledge lies there like hermetically sealed provisions waiting for the day when you may need a meal. Surely what the Collector was doing as he pored over his military manuals, was proving the superiority of the European way of doing things, of European culture itself. This was a culture so flexible that whatever he needed was there in a book at his elbow. An ordinary sort of man, he could, with the help of an oil-lamp, turn himself into a great military engineer, a bishop, an explorer or a General overnight, if the fancy took him.