Flood of Fire Quotes

“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

“I suppose everyone finds the despotisms of other peoples hard to comprehend.”
― Amitav Ghosh, Flood of Fire

“Chasing the dragon is an art, you know – it must be done properly.”
― Amitav Ghosh, Flood of Fire

“when merchants and traders begin to run wars – hundreds of lives depend on bribes.”
― Amitav Ghosh, Flood of Fire

“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

“The only way to find out was to try.”
― Amitav Ghosh, Flood of Fire

“The memories were so vivid that the book dropped from my hand and my eyes filled with tears.”
― Amitav Ghosh, Flood of Fire

“It is by worrying about adversity that people survive; complacency brings catastrophe.”
― Amitav Ghosh, Flood of Fire

“That was the ace hidden up the sleeves of the Jardines, Mathesons and Dents of the world. Despite all their cacklings about Free Trade, the truth was that their commercial advantages had nothing to do with markets or trade or more advanced business practices – it lay in the brute firepower of the British Empire’s guns and gunboats.”
― Amitav Ghosh, Flood of Fire

“Bir dil bilmenin, birkaç kitap okumanın insanlar arasında bağlılık yaratabileceğini düşünmek budalalıktır. Düşünceler, kitaplar, fikirler, sözcükler... tersine, bunlar seni daha da yalnızlaştırıyor, çünkü eskiden sende belki var olan içgüdüsel bazı sadakatleri yok ediyorlar.”
― Amitav Ghosh, Flood of Fire

“How was possible that a small no of men, in the span of a few hours or minutes, could decide the fate of millions of people yet unborn ? How was it possible that the outcome of those brief moments could determine who would determine who would rule whom, who would be rich or poor, master or servant, for generations to come ?
Nothing could be a greater injustice, yet such had been the reality ever since human beings first walked the earth.”
― Amitav Ghosh, Flood of Fire

“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, Flood of Fire

“Sometimes beauty is like curse,”
― Amitav Ghosh, Flood of Fire

“slowly he came to be filled with a great disgust for the life he had led before – a life of profligacy and poverty, in which he had wasted his mind and body in pointless pursuits, squandering his essences, bodily and spiritual, in fanciful imaginings. He longed to leave that life behind him but was again confounded by that hateful query: how?”
― Amitav Ghosh, Flood of Fire

“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, Flood of Fire

“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, Flood of Fire

“Havildar Kesri Singh özellikle böyle günlerde,yani taburu boyun eğdirilmiş bir ülkede yürürken ve öncü birliğin görevi sadece paltanın bayrağını dalgalandırıp yol kenarına toplanmış kalabalığa en iyi resmigeçit görüntüsünü vermek olduğunda en önde yürümeyi seven bir askerdi.”
― Amitav Ghosh, Flood of Fire

“I think Compton is right when he says that the reason the English use this word is because it is they who think of us as ‘barbarians’. They want war, so they are looking for excuses and even a word will do.”
― Amitav Ghosh, Flood of Fire

“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, Flood of Fire

“He (Kesri) understood that the gap left by his departure from home had been filled by the continuing flow of their lives.”
― Amitav Ghosh, Flood of Fire

“Have we not done enough by our duty, Shireen? Do we not also have a duty to ourselves?”
― Amitav Ghosh, Flood of Fire

“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, Flood of Fire

“whether he was with her or not, her voice had always been in his head;”
― Amitav Ghosh, Flood of Fire

“the last few months had passed in a kind of delirium”
― Amitav Ghosh, Flood of Fire

“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, Flood of Fire

“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, Flood of Fire

“Some day, following the example of men like themselves, said Mr Fraser, the Chinese too would take to Free Trade:”
― Amitav Ghosh, Flood of Fire

“To say that I was astounded would not express a tenth part of what I felt: I suddenly realized that I”
― Amitav Ghosh, Flood of Fire

“Before arriving at Chusan the British high command had told the troops that they would be welcomed by the islanders; the Manchus were so widely hated, they had said, that the soldiers of the expeditionary force were sure to be greeted as liberators.”
― Amitav Ghosh, Flood of Fire