Quotes from Amitav Ghosh

To want to be ahead, and to celebrate and mythify this endeavor, is indeed one of the most powerful impulses of modernity itself.

he recalled how a voice in his head had warned that he would pay for his pleasure one day. Now that the day had come

that he was no stranger to budmashing, barnshooting

Language was both his livelihood and his addiction and he was often preyed upon by a near irresistible compulsion to eavesdrop on conversations in public places.

That the world of today presents all the symptoms of demonic possession.

Have we not done enough by our duty, Shireen? Do we not also have a duty to ourselves?

there was nothing wrong: just a touch of the back-door trots - not the flux, for there was no sign of blood, no spotting in the mustard. 'I know how to take care o' myself: not the first time I've had a run of the squitters and collywobbles.

There are few expressions in the English language that are less attractive to women than 'Rare Book Dealer.

This is how power is eclipsed: in a moment of vivid realism, between the waning of one fantasy of governance and its replacement by the next; in an instant when the world springs free of its mooring of dreams and reveals itself to be girdled in the pathways of survival and self-preservation. The

yet the very name Ganga-Sagar, joining, as it did, river and sea, clear and dark, known and hidden, served to remind the migrants of the yawning chasm ahead; it was as if they were sitting balanced on the edge of a precipice, and the island were an outstretched limb of sacred Jambudvipa, their homeland, reaching out to keep them from tumbling into the void.

the last few months had passed in a kind of delirium

whether he was with her or not, her voice had always been in his head;

I think Compton is right when he says that the reason the English use this word is because it is they who think of us as 'barbarians'. They want war, so they are looking for excuses and even a word will do.

If whole societies and polities are to adapt then the necessary decisions will need to be made collectively, within political institutions, as happens in wartime or national emergencies. After all, isn't that what politics, in its most fundamental form, is about? Collective survival and the preservation of the body politic?

we knew, didn't we, that it would have to end one day? Apparently that day has come and we must accept it.

He (Kesri) understood that the gap left by his departure from home had been filled by the continuing flow of their lives.

dolphins in the water. He recalled that the dolphins usually gathered there when

I felt all of existence swelling in my veins. Letting my umbrella drop, I flung back my head to open myself to the wind and the suns. It was as though in the course of one night I had cast away the emptiness I had so long held in my arms.

To scuttle a boat you don't have to rip out the whole bottom, you just need to remove a few planks, one by one.

it seemed to me exceedingly peculiar that a man should love flowers as well as opium - and yet I see now that there is no contradiction in this, for are they not perhaps both a means to a kind of intoxication ? Could it not even be said that one might lead inevitably to the other ?

From the older ox the younger learns to plough.

But money, if not mastered, can bring ruin as well as riches

my life is not guided by reason; it is ruled, rather, by the inertia of habitual motion.

Bill McKibben wrote, 'We live in a post-natural world.' But did 'Nature' in this sense ever exist? Or was it rather the deification of the human that gave it an illusory apartness from ourselves? Now that non-human agencies have dispelled that illusion, we are confronted suddenly with a new task: that of finding other ways in which to imagine the unthinkable beings and events of this era.