Rima

“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

“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

“Two things cannot be in one place. Where you tend a rose, my lad, a thistle cannot grow.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett