Quotes from Amitav Ghosh

Sometimes, the lascars would gather between the bows to listen to the stories of the greybeards. There was the steward, Cornelius Pinto: a grey-haired Catholic, from Goa, he claimed to have been around the world twice, sailing in every kind of ship, with every kind of sailor - including Finns, who were known to be the warlocks and wizards of the sea, capable of conjuring up winds with a whistle.

And to no one is this state more attractive than to those whom it is consistently denied.

The hours are slow in passing as they always are when you are waiting in fear for you know not what: I am reminded of the moments before the coming of a cyclone, when you have barricaded yourself into your dwelling and have nothing else to do but wait. The moments will not pass, the air hangs still and heavy; it is as though time itself has been slowed by the friction of fear.

How do you lose a word? Does it vanish into your memory, like an old toy in a chest, and lie hidden in the cobwebs and dust, waiting to be cleaned out or rediscovered?

We must be the willow, not the oak, in the lowering storm.

in Bengal it was so easy to know who was who; more often than not, just to hear someone's name would reveal their religion, their caste, their village.

we are happy we soar very high and when we are not we fall into the depths of an abyss.

Ana (it is I)

Among Gandhi's best-known pronouncements on industrial capitalism are these famous lines written in 1928: "God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the West. If an entire nation of 300 millions [sic] took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.

Oh shame on you, who call yourself a Christian! Do you not see that it is the grossest idolatry to speak of the market as though it were the rival of God?

I was already well schooled in looking away, the jungle-craft of gentility.

No matter how hard the times at home may have been, in the ashes of every past there were a few cinders of memory that glowed with warmth—...

It occurred to him now to ask himself if this was how it happened : was it possible that the mere fact of using one's hands and investing one's attention in someone other than oneself, created a pride and tenderness that had nothing whatever to do with the response of the object of one's care - just as a craftsman's love for his handiwork is in no way diminished by the fact of it being unreciprocated?

On the cities of Venice and Varanasi] Everywhere you look there is evidence of the enchantment of decay, of a kind of beauty that can only be revealed by a long, slow fading.

She remembered a word he'd often used, karuna-one of the Buddha's words, Pali for compassion, for the immanence of all living things in each other, for the attraction of life for its likeness. A time will come, he had said to the girls, when you too will discover what this word karuna means, and from that moment on, your lives will never again be the same.

Sometimes beauty is like curse

Already the sahibs have done more to keep the lower castes in their places than our Hindu kings did over hundreds of years.

If there was an implicit self-hatred in trusting only your own, then how much deeper was the self-loathing that led a group of men to distrust someone for no reason other than that he was one of them?

Her hair, long, black and flowing, was her great asset, and she liked to wear it over her shoulders

Was it possible that some men possessed so great a force of character that they could stamp themselves upon their words such that no matter where they were read, or when, or in what language, their own distinctive tones would always be heard?

It's something you don't see until it's gone-the shapes and things have and the ways in which the people around you mould the shapes.

I don't remember much, which is a kind of mercy,I suppose. I see it in patterns. Sometimes it's like a scribble on a wall- no matter how many times you paint over it, a bit of it always comes through, but not enough to put together the whole. I try not to think about it too much.

slowly he came to be filled with a great disgust for the life he had led before – a life of profligacy and poverty, in which he had wasted his mind and body in pointless pursuits, squandering his essences, bodily and spiritual, in fanciful imaginings. He longed to leave that life behind him but was again confounded by that hateful query: how?

ON THE BANKS of every great river you'll find a monument to excess." Kanai recalled the list of examples Nirmal had provided to prove this: the opera house of Manaus, the temple of Karnak, the ten thousand pagodas of Pagan. In the years since, he had visited many of those places, and it made him laugh to think his uncle had insisted that Canning too had a place on that list: "The mighty Matla's monument is Port Canning.