Quotes from Amitav Ghosh

Recognition is famously a passage from ignorance to knowledge.

It would be enough; as an alibi for a life, it would do; she would not need to apologize for how she had spent her time on this earth.

I could not persuade her that a place does not merely exist, that it has to be invented in one's imagination.

In a way the better the master;the worse the condition of slave,because it makes him forget what he is.

The absence of food doesn't make a man forsake hunger-it only makes him hungrier .

I wanted to watch her walking, unselfconscious, for as long as possible.

in her inward reality she was a vehicle of transformation, travelling through the mists of illusion towards the elusive, ever-receding landfall that was Truth.

Similarly, at exactly the time when it has become clear that global warming is in every sense a collective predicament, humanity finds itself in the thrall of a dominant culture in which the idea of the collective has been exiled from politics, economics, and literature alike.

But here, in the tide country, transformation is the rule of life: rivers stray from week to week, and islands are made and unmade in days. In other places forests take centuries, even millennia, to regenerate; but mangroves can recolonize a denuded island in ten to fifteen years. Could it be the very rhythms of the earth were quickened here so that they unfolded at an accelerated pace?

Is it not amazing, Puggly dear, that whenever we begin to congratulate ourselves on the breadth of our knowledge of the world, we discover that there are multitudes of people, in every corner of the earth, who have seen vastly more than we can ever hope to?

I thought of how much they all wanted to be free; how they went mad wanting their freedom; I began to wonder whether it was I that was mad because I was happy to be bound; whether I was alone in knowing that I could not live without the clamour of the voices within me.

There was no place more solitary than a dark room, with its murky light and fetid closeness.

Democracy is a wonderful thing, Mr Burnham,' he said wistfully. 'It is a marvellous tamasha that keeps the common people busy so that men like ourselves can take care of all matters of importance. I hope one day India will also be able to enjoy these advantages—and China too, of course.

He said: 'You don't understand. We never thought that we were being used to conquer people. Not at all: we thought the opposite. We were told that we were freeing those people. That is what they said—that we were going to set those people free from their bad kings or their evil customs or some such thing. We believed it because they believed it too. It took us a long time to understand that in their eyes freedom exists wherever they rule.

I suspect that human beings were generally catastrophists at heart until their instinctive awareness of the earth's unpredictability was gradually supplanted by a belief in uniformitarianism—a regime of ideas that was supported by scientific theories like Lyell's, and also by a range of governmental practices that were informed by statistics and probability.

Well sir, if slavery is freedom then I'm glad I don't have to make a meal of it. Whips and chains are not much to my taste.

Where it concerns human beings, it is almost always true that the more anxiously we look for purity the more likely we are to come upon admixture and interbreeding.

How was it that no one had ever told her that it was not love itself, but its treacherous gatekeepers which made the greatest demands on your courage: the panic of acknowledging it; the terror of declaring it; the fear of being rebuffed? Why had no one told her that love's twin was not hate but cowardice?

an instance when Fate had conspired with Nature to give them a sign that theirs was no ordinary journey.

The true tragedy of a routinely spent life is that its wastefulness does not become apparent till it is too late.

Pon my sivvy, Miss Lambert! Aren't you quite the dandyzette today? Fit to knock a feller oolter-poolter on his beam ends!

already know by instinct we're not comfortably at home in our translated world.

when merchants and traders begin to run wars – hundreds of lives depend on bribes.

Thoughts, books, ideas, words – if anything, they make you more alone, because they destroy whatever instinctive loyalties you may once have possessed.