Quotes from Amitav Ghosh

Why should we try, why not just take the world as it is? I told her how he had said that we had to try because the alternative wasn't blankness – it only meant that if we didn't try ourselves, we would never be free of other people's inventions.

we, who have always thought of joy as rising . . . feel the emotion that almost amazes us when a happy thing falls.

The difference, Gopal told the Rationalists, between the Science Association and their own society was that they did not consider science alone, something people pursued in the seclusion of laboratories, important in itself. He himself was studying not science but English literature. Their aim was the application of rational principles to everything around them—to their own lives, to society, to religion, to history. It didn't matter what.

and that's why it's so hard for them when they discover that this equality they've been told about is a carrot on a stick – something that's dangled in front of their noses to keep them going, but always kept just out of reach.

Terror is an emanation of virtue.

What she had liked better still was his drowsy demeanour and slow manner of speech; he had seemed inoffensive, the kind of man who would go about his work without causing trouble, not the least desirable of qualities in a husband.

This is the great burden that now rests upon writers, artists, filmmakers, and everyone else who is involved in the telling of stories: to us falls the task of imaginatively restoring agency and voice to nonhumans. As with all the most important artistic endeavors in human history, this is a task that is at once aesthetic and political—and because of the magnitude of the crisis that besets the planet, it is now freighted with the most pressing moral urgency.

Bahram smiled to himself as he listened: the arguments were marvellously simple yet irrefutable. Really, there was no language like English for turning lies into legalisms.

Because words are just air, Kanai-babu,' Moyna said. When the wind blows on the water, you see ripples and waves, but the real river lies beneath, unseen and unheard. You can't blow on the water's surface from below, Kanai-babu. Only someone who's outside can do that, someone like you.

Children go to school for their first glimpse into the life of the mind. Not for jobs. If I thought that my teaching is nothing but a means of finding jobs, I'd stop teaching tomorrow.

In the past perhaps I would have declined, but I now recalled the Poet's dictum—"To stay is to be nowhere"—and I was happy to accept.

How do we quantify the help needed to rebuild these ruined lives? The question is answered easily enough if we pose it not in the abstract but in relation to ourselves. To put ourselves in the place of these victims is to know that all the help in the world would not be enough. Sufficiency is not a concept that is applicable here; potentially there is no limit to the amount of relief that can be used.

But if it were true that his life had somehow been molded by acts of power of which he was unaware—then it would follow that he had never acted of his own volition; never had a moment of true self-consciousness. Everything he had ever assumed about himself was a lie, an illusion. And if this were so, how was he to find himself now?

Rules, rules, she said softly. All you ever talk about is rules. That's how you and your kind have destroyed everything—science, religion, socialism—with your rules and your orthodoxies. That's the difference between us: you worry about rules and I worry about being human.

Even in that moment of distraction, Kanai noticed—so tenacious were the habits of his profession—that Fokir was using a different form of address with him now. From the respectful apni that he had been using before, he had switched to the same familiar tui Kanai had used in addressing him: it was as though in stepping onto the island, the authority of their positions had been reversed.

Tell him,' the woman said with a mocking smile, 'tell him that what he sees is the creature's member entering the body of its mate, doing what men and women must do ...

Nilima made her hands into fists and put them on her waist. "Nirmal, you have no idea of what it takes to do anything practical," she said. "You live in a dream world—a haze of poetry and fuzzy ideas about revolution. To build something is not the same as dreaming of it. Building is always a matter of well-chosen compromises.

The government is to you what God is to agnostics – only to be invoked when your own well-being is at stake!

History is notoriously not about the past.

But if it were true that his life had somehow been molded by acts of power of which he was unaware—then it would follow that he had never acted of his own volition; never had a moment of true self-consciousness. Everything he had ever assumed about himself was a lie, an illusion. And if this were so, how was he to find himself now? CHAPTER 37 When

that one could grant freedom by imposing subjugation? that one could open a cage by pushing it inside a bigger cage? How could any section of a people hope to achieve freedom where the entirety of a populace was held in subjection?

Where else could you belong, except in the place you refused to leave.

it was Manutius who invented italics, introduced the semicolon and gave the comma its distinctive hooked shape. As

The old loyalties of India, the ancient ones – they'd been destroyed long ago; the British had built their Empire by effacing them.