“ Speech was only a bag of tricks that fooled you into believing that you could see through the eyes of another being. Amitav Ghosh
“ That particular fear has the texture you can neither forget nor describe. It is like the fear of the victims of an earthquake, of people who have lost faith in the stillness of the earth. And yet it i… 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
“ 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,… 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
“ 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 p… 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… Amitav Ghosh
“ 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 technoc… 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 w… Amitav Ghosh
“ That unthinkable, adult truth: that need is not transitive, that one may need without oneself being needed. 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—… 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
“ In the old days, farmers would keep a little of their home-made opium for their families, to be used during illnesses, or at harvests and weddings; the rest they would sell to the local nobility, or t… Amitav Ghosh
“ If there was an implicit self-hatred in trusting only your own, then how much deeper was the self-loathing that led a group of men to distrust someone for no reason other than that he was one of them? 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 fadin… 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
“ 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,… Amitav Ghosh
“ She remembered a word he'd often used, karuna-one of the Buddha's words, Pali for compassion, for the immanence of all living things in each other, for the attraction of life for its likeness. A time… Amitav Ghosh
