Quotes by Amitav Ghosh

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

I had a book in my hands to while away the time and it occurred to me that in a way a landscape is not unlike a book - a compilation of pages that overlap without two ever being the same. People open the book according to their taste and training, their memories and desires. On occasion these pages are ruled with lines that are invisible to some people, while being for others, as real, as charged and as volatile as high-voltage cables.

Is it your implication that no good will come of this expedition?’‘Oh it will, sir; there’s no denying that.’ Captain Chillingworth’s words emerged very slowly, as if they had been pulled up from a deep well of bitterness. ‘I am sure it will do a great deal of good for some of us. But I doubt I’ll be of that number, or that many Chinamen will. 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.

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 people who were, of all, the most stubbornly rooted in the silt of the Ganga, in a soil that had to be sown with suffering to yield its crop of story and song? It was as if fate had thrust its fist through the living flesh of the land in order to tear away a piece of its stricken heart.

I could not persuade her that a place does not merely exist, that it has to be invented in ones imagination.

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

She remembered a word hed often used, karuna-one of the Buddhas words, Pali for compassion, for the immanence of all living things in each other, for the attraction of life for its likeness. A time will come, he had said to the girls, when you too will discover what this word karuna means, and from that moment on, your lives will never again be the same.

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.

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, a torment of the flesh, that carried one beyond the limits of ones mind to other times and other places, and even, if one was lucky, to a place where there was no border between oneself and ones image in the mirror.

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.

I dont remember much, which is a kind of mercy,I suppose. I see it in patterns.Sometimes its 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.

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

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

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 fading from sight, as a good translator should. For once, I shall be glad if my imperfections render me visible.

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?

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 to pykari merchants from Patna. Back then, a few clumps of poppy were enough to provide for a households needs, leaving a little over, to be sold: no one was inclined to plant more because of all the work it took to grow poppies - fifteen ploughings of the land and every remaining clod to be built; purchases of manure and constant watering; and after all that, the frenzy of the harvest, each bulb having to be individually nicked, drained and scrapped. Such punishment was bearable when you had a patch or two of poppies - but what sane person would want to multiply these labours when there were better, more useful crops to grow, like wheat, dal, vegetables? But those toothsome winter crops were steadily shrinking in acreage: now the factorys appetite for opium seemed never to be seated. Come the cold weather, the English sahibs would allow little else to be planted; their agents would go from home to home, forcing cash advances on the farmers, making them sign /asámi/ contracts. It was impossible to say no to them: if you refused they would leave their silver hidden in your house, or throw it through a window. It was no use telling the white magistrate that you hadnt accepted the money and your thumbprint was forged: he earned commissions on the oppium adn would never let you off. And, at the end of it, your earnings would come to no more than three-and-a-half sicca rupees, just about enough to pay off your advance.

Its something you dont see until its gone-the shapes and things have and the ways in which the people around you mould the shapes.

He said: You dont 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—that we were going to set those people free from their bad kings or their evil customs or some such thing. We believed it because they believed it too. It took us a long time to understand that in their eyes freedom exists wherever they rule.

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

Need is not transitive, one may need without oneself being needed.