Amitav Ghosh > Quotes

“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, The Hungry Tide

“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, The Glass Palace

“[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, The Shadow Lines

“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, The Glass Palace

“How was it that no one had ever told her that it was not love itself, but its treacherous gatekeepers which made the greatest demands on your courage: the panic of acknowledging it; the terror of declaring it; the fear of being rebuffed? Why had no one told her that love's twin was not hate but cowardice?”
― Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies

“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, The Shadow Lines

“Hold a bottle by the neck and a woman by the waist. Never the other way around”.”
― Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies

“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, The Shadow Lines

“The government to you is what God is to agnostics--only to be invoked when your own well being is at stake.”
― Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies

“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, Sea of Poppies

“(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, The Hungry Tide

“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, The Hungry Tide

“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, The Shadow Lines

“Contrary to what I might like to think,my life is not guided by reason;it is ruled rather by the inertia of habitual motion.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

“It is madness to think that knowing a language and reading a few books can create allegiances between people. Thoughts, books, ideas, words – if anything, they make you more alone, because they destroy whatever instinctive loyalties you may once have possessed.”
― Amitav Ghosh, Flood of Fire

“That unthinkable, adult truth: that need is not transitive, that one may need without oneself being needed.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines

“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, The Shadow Lines

“People like my grandmother, who have no home but in memory, learn to be very skilled in the art of recollection.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines

“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, The Glass Palace

“[T]he great, irreplaceable potentiality of fiction is that it makes possible the imagining of possibilities.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

“Nobody knows, nobody can ever know, not even in memory, because there are moments in time that are not knowable.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines

“Similarly, 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.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

“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, The Hungry Tide

“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, Sea of Poppies

“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, The Hungry Tide

“It would be enough; as an alibi for a life, it would do; she would not need to apologize for how she had spent her time on this earth.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide

“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, The Hungry Tide

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

“Need is not transitive, one may need without oneself being needed.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines

“The true tragedy of a routinely spent life is that its wastefulness does not become apparent till it is too late.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide