Quotes from Amitav Ghosh

I had thought you were a better man, Mr Reid, a man of your word, but I see that you are nothing but a paltry hommelette.' 'An omelette?' 'Yes, your word is not worth a dam.

With every step her carriage seemed to become a little straighter and her movements more assured: it was as though the mere proximity of the building had caused a brisk professional to emerge from the chrysalis of a careworn wife and mother.

It was as if an embankment had been swept away and I (Neel ) were floundering in a flood , trying not to drown in my grief.

And to imagine other forms of human existence is exactly the challenge that is posed by the climate crisis: for if there is one thing that global warming has made perfectly clear it is that to think about the world only as it is amounts to a formula for collective suicide. We need, rather, to envision what it might be.

How was possible that a small no of men, in the span of a few hours or minutes, could decide the fate of millions of people yet unborn ? How was it possible that the outcome of those brief moments could determine who would determine who would rule whom, who would be rich or poor, master or servant, for generations to come ? Nothing could be a greater injustice, yet such had been the reality ever since human beings first walked the earth.

to listen to him was a venture of collaboration, in which the things that were spoken of came gradually to be transformed into artefacts of a shared imagining.

In a way it was a relief to be spared the responsibilities that came with a knowledge of the details of another life.

The Tang went into decline and people became discontented. There was hunger and unrest, and as is common at such times, the troublemakers looked to place the blame on the foreigners.

Mere shame couldn't, after all, be counted on to provide the escape of death.

for it does take greatness, I think, to stand resolutely against your own people, especially when you are alone, and especially when you that even history will not be kind to you, since you will have forever given the lie all the claims with which the High and the Mighty will try to exonerate themselves.

The war, when it comes, will not be for opium. It will be for a principle: for freedom – for the freedom of trade and for the freedom of the Chinese people. Free Trade is a right conferred on Man by God, and its principles apply as much to opium as to any other article of trade. More so perhaps, since in its absence many millions of natives would be denied the lasting advantages of British influence.

Jesus Christ is Free Trade and Free Trade is Jesus Christ." Truer words, I believe, were never spoken. If it is God's will that opium be used as an instrument to open China to his teachings, then so be it.

not one of them had ever imagined, or could believe, that it might be possible to look at the world through the eye of a storm.

Stars and planets, after all, travelled on predictable orbits - but the wind, nobody knew where the wind would choose to go.

that politics has invaded everything, spared nothing . . . religion, art, family . . . it has taken over everything . . . there is no escape from it . . .

That which a man takes for himself no one can deny him.

How do you fight an enemy who fights from neither enmity nor anger but in submission to orders from superiors, without protest and without conscience?

Some day, following the example of men like themselves, said Mr Fraser, the Chinese too would take to Free Trade:

her dream of becoming a nurse was no ordinary yearning : it was the product of a desire as richly and completely imagined as a novel or a poem. It recalled for him what it meant to be driven to better yourself, to lay claim to a wider world.

It was as if the two women represented the poles of his desires, one of them forthright, spontaneous and simple in her tastes; the other engimatic, sophisticated, wedded to luxury.

To bend the work of nature to your will; to make the trees of the earth useful to human beings - what could be more admirable , more exciting than this? That is what I would say to any boy who has his life before him.

THE PREVALENCE OF the word "New" in maps of the Americas and Australia points to one of the most important aspects of European expansion: ecological and topographic transformation.

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. Foreigners were, by comparison, so opaque: it was impossible to speculate about them.

If you're in command, it's always your fault.