Quotes from Amitav Ghosh

Her mind seemed to have no room for anything but the crowded eventlessness of her everyday life.

As I thought of these things, it seemed to me that this whole world had become a place of animals, and our fault, our crime, was that we were just human beings, trying to live as human beings always have, from the water and the soil. No one could think this a crime unless they have forgotten that this is how humans have always lived—by fishing, by clearing land and by planting the soil.

Look, we don't love like flowers with only one season behind us; when we love, a sap older than memory rises in our arms. O girl, it's like this: inside us we haven't loved just some one in the future, but a fermenting tribe; not just one child, but fathers, cradled inside us like ruins of mountains, the dry riverbed of former mothers, yes, and all that soundless landscape under its clouded or clear destiny—girl, all this came before you.

When I look into my past the river seems to meet my eyes, staring back, as if to ask, Do you recognize me, wherever you are? Recognition

For him it meant that everything which existed was interconnected: the trees, the sky, the weather, people, poetry, science, nature. He hunted down facts in the way a magpie collects shiny things. Yet when he strung them all together, somehow they did become stories — of a kind.

Tridib often said of her, the inventions she lived in moved with her, so that although she had lived in many places, she had never travelled at all.

L'oppio inonderà il mercato come un diluvio monsonico

is morbid individualism that turns crises into tragedies.

furious growth of Covid- 19 cases in those parts of the US where many people regarded masking as an infringement of their individual liberties suggests that it is morbid individualism that turns crises into tragedies.

Indeed, this is perhaps the most important question ever to confront culture in the broadest sense – for let us make no mistake: the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination. Culture generates desires – for vehicles and appliances, for certain kinds of gardens and dwellings – that are among the principal drivers of the carbon economy.

Sometimes, said Moyna, it seemed as though both land and water were turning against those who lived in the Sunderbans.

For instance: if contemporary trends in architecture, even in this period of accelerating carbon emissions, favor shiny, glass-and-metal-plated towers, do we not have to ask, What are the patterns of desire that are fed by these gestures? If I, as a novelist, choose to use brand names as elements in the depiction of character, do I not need to ask myself about the degree to which this makes me complicit in the manipulations of the marketplace?

It was not that he was a man of unusual courage—far from it. But he knew also that fear was not—contrary to what was often said—an instinct. It was something learned, something that accumulated in the mind through knowledge, experience and upbringing.

there was a land of sugar, where everything was sweet; and also a country made of cloth, and an island of chains.

I thought of all the hours that i has spent at passport and visa counters, and the stark terror that an immigration officer's frown could still send through me.

at exactly the time when it has become clear that global warming is in every sense a collective predicament, humanity finds itself in the thrall of a dominant culture in which the idea of the collective has been exiled from politics, economics and literature alike.

Raising her voice, the woman said to the crowd, in archaic rustic Bengali: 'The time is here, pray that all goes well for our Laakhan, once again.

Unlikely though it may seem today, the nineteenth century was indeed a time when it was assumed, in both fiction and geology, that Nature was moderate and orderly: this was a distinctive mark of a new and 'modern' worldview.

The masthead said The Colonial Services Gazette, in beautiful Gothic characters. Beside the name was a dateline: 'Calcutta, the twelfth of January, 1898'.

So to say that you don't believe in the supernatural is a contradiction in terms - because it means that you also don't believe in the natural. Neither can exist without the other.' 'Oh come on', I said impatiently. 'That's just semantics'. 'Yes, you're right. But the whole world is made up of semantics and yours are those of the seventeenth century. Even though you think you are modern.

If the charter of your liberties entails death and despair for untold multitudes, then it is nothing but a license for slaughter.