Amitav Ghosh > Quotes

“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

“(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

“Ana (it is I)”
― Amitav Ghosh, In An Antique Land

“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

“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

“(...) an instance when Fate had conspired with Nature to give them a sign that theirs was no ordinary journey.”
― Amitav Ghosh, River of Smoke

“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