'A Passage to India' Quotes

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A Passage to India is a famous modern novel by E.M. Forester. Set during the English colonization of India, the novel dramatically depicts some of the conflicts between the Indian people and the colonial government. Here are a few quotes from A Passage to India.

• "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."
  - E.M. Forster, A Passage to India, Ch. 1
  
  
• "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."
  - E.M. Forster, A Passage to India, Ch. 1
  
  
• "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."
  - E.M. Forster, A Passage to India, Ch. 2
  
  
• "He has found out our dinner hour, that's all, and chooses to interrupt us every time, in order to show his power."
  - E.M. Forster, A Passage to India, Ch. 2
  
  
• "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."
  - E.M. Forster, A Passage to India, Ch. 2
  
  
• "Islam an attitude towards life both exquisite and durable, where his body and his thoughts found their home."
  - E.M. Forster, A Passage to India, Ch. 2
  
  
• "That makes no difference. God is here."
  - E.M. Forster, A Passage to India, Ch. 2
  
  
• "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."
  - E.M. Forster, A Passage to India, Ch. 2
  
  
• "I want to see the real India."
  - E.M. Forster, A Passage to India, Ch. 3
  
  
• "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."
  - E.M. Forster, A Passage to India, Ch. 3
  
  
• "Adventures do occur, but not punctually."
  - E.M. Forster, A Passage to India, Ch. 3
  
  
• "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."
  - E.M. Forster, A Passage to India, Ch. 3
  
  
• "It is easy to sympathize at a distance. I value more the kind word that is spoken close to my ear."
  - E.M. Forster, A Passage to India, Ch. 4
  
  
• "No, no, this is going to far. We must exclude someone from our gathering, or we shall be left with nothing."
  - E.M. Forster, A Passage to India, Ch. 4
  
  
• "No, it was not picturesque; the East, abandoning its secular magnificence, was descending into a valley whose farther side no man can see."
  - E.M. Forster, A Passage to India, Ch. 5
  
  
• "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."
  - E.M. Forster, A Passage to India, Ch. 5
  
  
• "he 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."
  - E.M. Forster, A Passage to India, Ch. 7
  
  
• "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."
  - E.M. Forster, A Passage to India, Ch. 7
  
  
• "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."
  - E.M. Forster, A Passage to India, Ch. 8
  
  

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