Amitav Ghosh Quotes & Sayings

I'd been surprised by the depth of emotion that was invested in that curiously archaic phrase 'great power'. What would it mean, I'd asked myself, to the lives of working journalists, salaried technocrats and so on if India achieved 'great power status'? What were the images evoked by this tag?
Now, walking through this echoing old palace, looking at the pictures in the corridors, this aspiration took on, for the first time, the contours of an imagined reality. This is what the nuclearists wanted: to sign treaties, to be pictured with the world's powerful, to hang portraits on their walls, to become ancestors. On the bomb they had pinned their hopes of bringing it all back. — Amitav Ghosh

She had talked of this at length with Kadambari - Mrs. Dutt: Why should it not be possible for these freedoms to be universally available for women everywhere? And Mrs. Dutt had said that of course, this was one of the great benefits of British rule in India; that it had given women rights and protections that they'd never had before. At this, Uma had felt herself, for the first time, falling utterly out of sympathy with her new friend. She had known instinctively that this was a false argument, unfounded and illogical. How was it possible to imagine 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? — Amitav Ghosh

Dolphins in the water. He recalled that the dolphins usually gathered there when — Amitav Ghosh

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. — Amitav Ghosh

You see, in our family we don't know whether we're coming or going - it's all my grandmother's fault. But, of course, the fault wasn't hers at all: it lay in language. Every language assumes a centrality, a fixed and settled point to go away from and come back to, and what my grandmother was looking for was a word for a journey which was not a coming or a going at all; a journey that was a search for precisely that fixed point which permits the proper use of verbs of movement. — Amitav Ghosh

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

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. — Amitav Ghosh

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

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

One could never know anything except through desire, real desire, which was not the same thing as greed or lust; a pure, painful and primitive desire, a longing for everything that was not in oneself, a torment of the flesh, that carried one beyond the limits of one's mind to other times and other places, and even, if one was lucky, to a place where there was no border between oneself and one's image in the mirror. — Amitav Ghosh

Beauty is nothing but the start of terror we can hardly bear, and we adore it because of the serene scorn it could kill us with ... — Amitav Ghosh

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. — Amitav Ghosh

( ... ) an instance when Fate had conspired with Nature to give them a sign that theirs was no ordinary journey. — Amitav Ghosh

From the older ox the younger learns to plough. — Amitav Ghosh

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? — Amitav Ghosh

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

[T]hat state, love, is so utterly alien to that other idea without which we cannot live as human beings
the idea of justice. It is only because love is so profoundly the enemy of justice that our minds, shrinking in horor from its true nature, try to tame it by uniting it with its opposite [ ... ] in the hope that if we apply all the metaphors of normality, that if we heap them high enough, we shall, in the end, be able to approximate that state metaphorically. — Amitav Ghosh

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? — Amitav Ghosh

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

Sometimes beauty is like curse, — Amitav Ghosh

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. — Amitav Ghosh

It was a single poppy seed ... she rolled it between her fingers and raised her eyes past the straining sails, to the star-filled vault above. On any other night she would have scanned the sky for the planet she had always thought to be the arbiter of her fate - but tonight her eyes dropped instead to the tiny sphere she was holding between her thumb and forefinger. She looked at the seed as if she had never seen one before, and suddenly she knew that it was not the planet above that governed her life: it was this minuscule orb - at once bountiful and all-devouring, merciful and destructive, sustaining and vengeful. This was her Shani, her Saturn. — Amitav Ghosh

Recognition is famously a passage from ignorance to knowledge. — Amitav Ghosh

I thought of how much they all wanted to be free; how they went mad wanting their freedom; I began to wonder whether it was I that was mad because I was happy to be bound; whether I was alone in knowing that I could not live without the clamour of the voices within me. — Amitav Ghosh

Was this how a mutiny was sparked? In a moment of heedlessness, so that one became a stranger to the person one had been a moment before? Or was it the other way around? That this was when one recognized the stranger that one had always been to oneself; that all one's loyalties and beliefs had been misplaced? — Amitav Ghosh

Democracy is a wonderful thing, Mr Burnham,' he said wistfully. 'It is a marvellous tamasha that keeps the common people busy so that men like ourselves can take care of all matters of importance. I hope one day India will also be able to enjoy these advantages - and China too, of course. — Amitav Ghosh

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

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

But here, in the tide country, transformation is the rule of life: rivers stray from week to week, and islands are made and unmade in days. In other places forests take centuries, even millennia, to regenerate; but mangroves can recolonize a denuded island in ten to fifteen years. Could it be the very rhythms of the earth were quickened here so that they unfolded at an accelerated pace? — Amitav Ghosh

Yet, unbeknownst to him, it had been kept alive - and it was only now, in listening to Deet's songs, that he recognized that the secret source of its nourishment was music: he had always had a great love of dadras, chaitis, barahmasas, horis, kajris - songs such as Deeti was singing. Listening to her now, he knew why Bhojpuri was the language of this music: because of all the tongues spoken between the Ganges and the Indus, there was none that was its equal in the expression of the nuances of love, longing and separation - of the plight of those who leave and those who stay at home. — Amitav Ghosh

Whatever the case, he saw now that it was a rare, difficult and improbable thing for two people from worlds apart to find themselves linked by a tie of pure sympathy, a feeling that owed nothing to the rules and expectations of others. He understood also that when such a bond comes into being, its truths and falsehoods, its obligations and privileges, exist only for the people who are linked by it, and then in such a way that only they can judge the honour and dishonour of how they conduct themselves in relation to each other. — Amitav Ghosh

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. — Amitav Ghosh

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 - ... — Amitav Ghosh

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. — Amitav Ghosh

The only way to find out was to try. — Amitav Ghosh

The government to you is what God is to agnostics
only to be invoked when your own well being is at stake. — Amitav Ghosh

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. — Amitav Ghosh

You have to remember, Kanai, she said at length, that as a young man Nirmal was in love with the idea of revolution. Men like that, even when they turn their backs on their party and their comrades, can never let go of the idea: it's the secret god that rules their hearts. It is what makes them come alive; they revel in the danger, the exquisite pain. It is to them what childbirth is to a woman, or war to mercenary. — Amitav Ghosh

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

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. — Amitav Ghosh

The truth is, sir, that men do what their power permits them to do. We are no different from the Pharaohs or the Mongols: the difference is only that when we kill people we feel compelled to pretend that it is for some higher cause. It is this pretence of virtue, I promise you, that will never be forgiven by history. — Amitav Ghosh

She had no right to live there. She doesn't belong there. It took those people a long time to build that country; hundreds of years, years and years of war and bloodshed. Everyone who lives there has earned his right to be there with blood: with their brother's blood and their father's blood and their son's blood. They know they're a nation because they have drawn their borders with blood. Regimental flags hang in their cathedrals and all their churches are lined with memorials to men who died in wars, all around the world. War is their religion. That's what it takes to make a country. Once that happens people forget they were born this or that, Muslim or Hindu, Bengali or Punjabi: they become a family born of the same pool of blood. That is what you have to achieve for India, don't you see? — Amitav Ghosh

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. — Amitav Ghosh

Some nine years before, Mr. Tan Chay Yan, scion of a well-known Peranakan Chinese family of Malacca, had converted his pepper garden into a rubber plantation. In 1897 this had seemed like a mad thing to do. Everyone had advised against it: rubber was known to be a risk. Mr. Ridley, the curator of the Singapore Botanical Gardens, had been trying for years to interest British planters in giving rubber a try. The imperial authorities in London had spent a fortune in arranging to have seed stocks stolen from Brazil. — Amitav Ghosh

I could not persuade her that a place does not merely exist, that it has to be invented in one's imagination. — Amitav Ghosh

The memories were so vivid that the book dropped from my hand and my eyes filled with tears. — Amitav Ghosh

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

( ... )- 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. — Amitav Ghosh

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. — Amitav Ghosh

That unthinkable, adult truth: that need is not transitive, that one may need without oneself being needed. — Amitav Ghosh

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. — Amitav Ghosh

(He) was in love with the idea of revolution. Men like that, even when they turn their backs on their party and their comrades, can never let go of the idea: it's the secret god that rules their hearts. It is what makes them come alive; they revel in the danger, the exquisite pain. It is to them what childbirth is to a woman, or war to a mercenary. — Amitav Ghosh

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, — Amitav Ghosh

Speech was only a bag of tricks that fooled you into believing that you could see through the eyes of another being. — Amitav Ghosh

Whether he was with her or not, her voice had always been in his head; — Amitav Ghosh

This is my gift to you, this story that is also a song, these words that are a part of Fokir. Such flaws as there are in my rendition of it I do not regret, for perhaps they will prevent me from fading from sight, as a good translator should. For once, I shall be glad if my imperfections render me visible. — Amitav Ghosh

He said: 'You don't understand. We never thought that we were being used to conquer people. Not at all: we thought the opposite. We were told that we were freeing those people. That is what they said - that we were going to set those people free from their bad kings or their evil customs or some such thing. We believed it because they believed it too. It took us a long time to understand that in their eyes freedom exists wherever they rule. — Amitav Ghosh

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? — Amitav Ghosh

There was no place more solitary than a dark room, with its murky light and fetid closeness. — Amitav Ghosh

Why don't they complain?"
"They do sometimes. But usually there's nothing in particular to complain about. Take the case of Hardy's appointment: Who was to blame? Hardy himself? The men? It certainly wasn't the CO. But that's how it always is. Whenever one of us doesn't get an appointment or a promotion, there's always a mist of regulations that makes things unclear. On the surface everything in the army appears to be ruled by manuals, regulations, procedures: it seems very cut and dried. But actually, underneath there are all these murky shadows that you can never quite see: prejudice, distrust, suspicion. — Amitav Ghosh

In a way the better the master;the worse the condition of slave,because it makes him forget what he is. — Amitav Ghosh

Nobody knows, nobody can ever know, not even in memory, because there are moments in time that are not knowable. — Amitav Ghosh

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

And now, indeed, everything began to look new, unexpected, full of surprises. I had a book in my hands to while away the time, and it occurred to me that in a way a landscape is not unlike a book
a compilation of pages that overlap without any two ever being the same. People open the book according to their taste and training, their memories and desires: for a geologist the compilation opens at one page, for a boatman at another, and still another for a ship's pilot, a painter and so on. On occasion these pages are ruled with lines that are invisible to some people, while being for others as real, as charged and as volatile as high-voltage cables. — Amitav Ghosh

The absence of food doesn't make a man forsake hunger-it only makes him hungrier . — Amitav Ghosh

To use the past to justify the present is bad enough - but it's just as bad to use the present to justify the past. — Amitav Ghosh

That he was no stranger to budmashing, barnshooting — Amitav Ghosh

People like my grandmother, who have no home but in memory, learn to be very skilled in the art of recollection. — Amitav Ghosh

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. — Amitav Ghosh

I suppose everyone finds the despotisms of other peoples hard to comprehend. — Amitav Ghosh

like the big bed it was enclosed in a permanent canopy of heavy netting. Mosquitoes were the least of the creatures this net was intended to exclude; its absence, at any time, night or day, would have been an invitation for snakes and scorpions to make their way between the sheets. In a hut by the pond a woman was even said to have found a large dead fish in her bed. This was a koimachh, or tree perch, a species known to be able to manipulate its spiny fins in such a way as to drag itself overland for short distances. It had found its way into the bed only to suffocate on the mattress. — Amitav Ghosh

I wanted to watch her walking, unselfconscious, for as long as possible. — Amitav Ghosh

Nabadwip, a centre of piety and learning consecrated to the memory of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu - saint, mystic, and devotee of Sri Krishna. — Amitav Ghosh

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

Well sir, if slavery is freedom then I'm glad I don't have to make a meal of it. Whips and chains are not much to my taste. — Amitav Ghosh

It is by worrying about adversity that people survive; complacency brings catastrophe. — Amitav Ghosh

There is something strikingly different about the quality of photographs of that time. It has nothing to do with age or colour, or the feel of paper ... In modern family photographs the camera pretends to circulate like a friend, clicking its shutters at those moments when its subjects have disarranged themselves to present to it those postures which they would like to think of as informal. But in pictures of that time, the camera is still a public and alien eye, faced with which people feel bound either to challenge the intrusion by striking postures of defiant hilarity, or else to compose their faces, and straighten their shoulders, not always formally, but usually with just that hint of stiffness which suggests a public face. — Amitav Ghosh

Hold a bottle by the neck and a woman by the waist. Never the other way around. — Amitav Ghosh

Is it not amazing, Puggly dear, that whenever we begin to congratulate ourselves on the breadth of our knowledge of the world, we discover that there are multitudes of people, in every corner of the earth, who have seen vastly more than we can ever hope to? — Amitav Ghosh

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

Kanai, the dreamers have everyone to speak for them,' she said, 'But those who try to be strong, who try to build things - no one ever sees any poetry in that, do they? — Amitav Ghosh

For Ila the current was the real: it was as though she lived in a present which was like an airlock in a canal, shut away from the tidewaters of the past and the future by steel floodgates. — Amitav Ghosh

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

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? — Amitav Ghosh

There seemed never to be a moment when he was not haunted by the fear of being thought lacking by his British colleagues. And yet it seemed to be universally agreed that he was one of the most successful Indians of his generation, a model for his countrymen. Did this mean that one day all of India would become a shadow of what he had been? Millions of people trying to live their lives in conformity with incomprehensible rules? Better to be what Dolly had been: a woman who had no illusions about the nature of her condition; a prisoner who knew the exact dimensions of her cage and could look for contentment within those confines. — Amitav Ghosh

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

The last few months had passed in a kind of delirium — Amitav Ghosh

What would it be like if I had something to defend - a home, a country, a family - and I found myself attacked by these ghostly men, these trusting boys? How do you fight an enemy who fights with neither enmity nor anger but in submission to orders from superiors, without protest and without conscience? — Amitav Ghosh

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. — Amitav Ghosh

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

Thinking about it later he understood that a battle was a distillation of time: many years of preparation and decades of innovation and change were squeezed into a clash of very short duration. And when it was over the impact radiated backwards and forwards through time, determining the future — Amitav Ghosh

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 — Amitav Ghosh

There was a time when the Bengali language was an angry flood trying to break down her door. She would crawl into a closet and lock herself in, stuffing her ears to shut out those sounds. But a door was no defense against her parents' voices: it was in that language that they fought, and the sounds of their quarrels would always find ways of trickling in under the door and thorugh the cracks, the level rising until she thought she would drown in the flood ... The accumulated resentsmnets of their life were always phrased in the language, so that for her its sound had come to represent the music of unhappiness. — Amitav Ghosh

How had it happened that when choosing the men and women who were to be torn from this subjugated plain, the hand of destiny had stayed so far inland, away from the busy coastlines, to alight on the people who were, of all, the most stubbornly rooted in the silt of the Ganga, in a soil that had to be sown with suffering to yield its crop of story and song? It was as if fate had thrust its fist through the living flesh of the land in order to tear away a piece of its stricken heart. — Amitav Ghosh

Pon my sivvy, Miss Lambert! Aren't you quite the dandyzette today? Fit to knock a feller oolter-poolter on his beam ends! — Amitav Ghosh

I know nothing of this silence except that it lies outside the reach of my intelligence, beyond words - that is why this silence must win, must inevitably defeat me, because it is not a presence at all. — Amitav Ghosh

( ... ) 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 ? — Amitav Ghosh

In a further effort to be helpful, I tried to pry the dentures apart. But Rajkumar had grown impatient and he snatched the tumbler from me. It was only after he had thrust his teeth into his mouth that he discovered that Uma's dentures were clamped within his. And then, as he was sitting there, staring in round-eyed befuddlement at the pink jaws that were protruding out of his own, an astonishing thing happened - Uma leaned forward and fastened her mouth on her own teeth. Their mouths clung to each other and they shut their eyes. — Amitav Ghosh