Amitav Quotes

#1. Amitav Ghosh's multigenerational saga The Glass Palace, set in colonial Burma, India, and Malaya, tells the story of Rajkumar, once a poor Indian boy, who becomes a wealthy teak trader in Burma, and lovely Dolly, former child-maid to the queen and second princess of Burma.

Nancy Pearl

#2. If you think of India in the 1980s, there weren't many writers in English around. The ones that were there, Amitav Ghosh or Vikram Seth, were living abroad or publishing from abroad.

Pankaj Mishra

#3. From the older ox the younger learns to plough.

Amitav Ghosh

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. In her inward reality she was a vehicle of transformation, travelling through the mists of illusion towards the elusive, ever-receding landfall that was Truth.

Amitav Ghosh

#7. 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

#8. Dolphins in the water. He recalled that the dolphins usually gathered there when

Amitav Ghosh

#9. That unthinkable, adult truth: that need is not transitive, that one may need without oneself being needed.

Amitav Ghosh

#10. Have we not done enough by our duty, Shireen? Do we not also have a duty to ourselves?

Amitav Ghosh

#11. We are happy we soar very high and when we are not we fall into the depths of an abyss.

Amitav Ghosh

#12. ( ... ) 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

#13. Hold a bottle by the neck and a woman by the waist. Never the other way around.

Amitav Ghosh

#14. The memories were so vivid that the book dropped from my hand and my eyes filled with tears.

Amitav Ghosh

#15. 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

#16. It was as if the two women represented the poles of his desires, one of them forthright, spontaneous and simple in her tastes; the other engimatic, sophisticated, wedded to luxury.

Amitav Ghosh

#17. And to no one is this state more attractive than to those whom it is consistently denied.

Amitav Ghosh

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. Heuristic decision making is fast and frugal and is often based on the evaluation of one or two salient bits of information. We

Amitav Chakravarti

#21. 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

#22. I suppose everyone finds the despotisms of other peoples hard to comprehend.

Amitav Ghosh

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

Amitav Ghosh

#24. We must be the willow, not the oak, in the lowering storm.

Amitav Ghosh

#25. 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

#26. But money, if not mastered, can bring ruin as well as riches,

Amitav Ghosh

#27. 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

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

Amitav Ghosh

#29. That he was no stranger to budmashing, barnshooting

Amitav Ghosh

#30. I was already well schooled in looking away, the jungle-craft of gentility.

Amitav Ghosh

#31. 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

#32. The Tang went into decline and people became discontented. There was hunger and unrest, and as is common at such times, the troublemakers looked to place the blame on the foreigners.

Amitav Ghosh

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. The wind is rising and we must make sail. Anchors aweigh! We must be off!

Amitav Ghosh

#36. I wanted to watch her walking, unselfconscious, for as long as possible.

Amitav Ghosh

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. The government to you is what God is to agnostics
only to be invoked when your own well being is at stake.

Amitav Ghosh

#40. Recognition is famously a passage from ignorance to knowledge.

Amitav Ghosh

#41. That which a man takes for himself no one can deny him.

Amitav Ghosh

#42. Mere shame couldn't, after all, be counted on to provide the escape of death.

Amitav Ghosh

#43. Whether he was with her or not, her voice had always been in his head;

Amitav Ghosh

#44. Nobody knows, nobody can ever know, not even in memory, because there are moments in time that are not knowable.

Amitav Ghosh

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

Amitav Ghosh

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. The absence of food doesn't make a man forsake hunger-it only makes him hungrier .

Amitav Ghosh

#50. The only way to find out was to try.

Amitav Ghosh

#51. It is by worrying about adversity that people survive; complacency brings catastrophe.

Amitav Ghosh

#52. 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

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. 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

#59. The last few months had passed in a kind of delirium

Amitav Ghosh

#60. 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

#61. Sometimes beauty is like curse,

Amitav Ghosh

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

Amitav Ghosh

#63. 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

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

Amitav Ghosh

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

Amitav Ghosh

#66. 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

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

Amitav Ghosh

#68. 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

#69. Her hair, long, black and flowing, was her great asset, and she liked to wear it over her shoulders,

Amitav Ghosh

#70. 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

#71. There was no place more solitary than a dark room, with its murky light and fetid closeness.

Amitav Ghosh

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

Amitav Ghosh

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

Amitav Ghosh