Quotes from Amitav Ghosh

Chasing the dragon is an art, you know – it must be done properly.

I suppose everyone finds the despotisms of other peoples hard to comprehend.

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

The memories were so vivid that the book dropped from my hand and my eyes filled with tears.

But there is another reason why, from the writer's point of view, it would serve no purpose to approach them in that way: because to treat them as magical or surreal would be to rob them of precisely the quality that makes them so urgently compelling—which is that they are actually happening on this earth, at this time.

That was the ace hidden up the sleeves of the Jardines, Mathesons and Dents of the world. Despite all their cacklings about Free Trade, the truth was that their commercial advantages had nothing to do with markets or trade or more advanced business practices – it lay in the brute firepower of the British Empire's guns and gunboats.

People think that knowing the future can help you prepare for what is to come - but often it only makes you powerless.

The wind is rising and we must make sail. Anchors aweigh! We must be off!

annihilation. "Money flows toward short term gain," writes the geologist David Archer, "and toward the over-exploitation of unregulated common resources. These tendencies are like the invisible hand of fate, guiding the hero in a Greek tragedy toward his inevitable doom." This is indeed the essence of humanity's present derangement.

Significant sections of the electorate probably understand that climate change negotiations may have the effect of changing their country's standing in the world's hierarchies of power as well as wealth: this may indeed form the basis of their resistance to climate science in general. The refusal to

You have to remember, Kanai, she said at length, that as a young man Nirmal was in love with the idea of revolution. Men like that, even when they turn their backs on their party and their comrades, can never let go of the idea: it's the secret god that rules their hearts. It is what makes them come alive; they revel in the danger, the exquisite pain. It is to them what childbirth is to a woman, or war to mercenary.

Speech was only a bag of tricks that fooled you into believing that you could see through the eyes of another being.

For Ila the current was the real: it was as though she lived in a present which was like an airlock in a canal, shut away from the tidewaters of the past and the future by steel floodgates.

C]apitalist trade and industry cannot thrive without access to military and political power. State interventions have always been critical to its advancement.

It is by worrying about adversity that people survive; complacency brings catastrophe.

I had a book in my hands to while away the time and it occurred to me that in a way a landscape is not unlike a book - a compilation of pages that overlap without two ever being the same. People open the book according to their taste and training, their memories and desires. On occasion these pages are ruled with lines that are invisible to some people, while being for others, as real, as charged and as volatile as high-voltage cables.

Just as novels have come to be seen as narratives of identity, so too has politics become, for many, a search for personal authenticity, a journey of self-discovery.

beauty is nothing but the start of terror we can hardly bear, and we adore it because of the serene scorn it could kill us with

it is a grave error to imagine that the world is not preparing for the disrupted planet of the future. It's just that it's not preparing by taking mitigatory measures or by reducing emissions: instead, it is preparing for a new geopolitical struggle for dominance.

The only way to find out was to try.

Insofar as the idea of the limitlessness of human freedom is central to the arts of our time, this is also where the Anthropocene will most intransigently resist them.

At the same time, it has also reinforced the mind-body dualism to the point of producing the illusion, so powerfully propagated in cyberspace, that human beings have freed themselves from their material circumstances to the point where they have become floating personalities "decoupled from a body.

the possibility of our deliverance lies not in the future but in the past, in a mystery beyond memory.

That happens you know, as you grow older – you can't tell the dreams from the memories.