AGAmitav Ghosh

23 collected words

Amitav Ghosh

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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Quotations and sayings

01Undated

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

Amitav Ghosh / quote

02Undated

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.

Amitav Ghosh / quote

03Undated

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.

Amitav Ghosh / quote

04Undated

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.

Amitav Ghosh / quote

05Undated

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

Amitav Ghosh / quote

06Undated

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

Amitav Ghosh / quote

07Undated

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 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.

Amitav Ghosh / quote

08Undated

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 / quote

09Undated

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 one's mind to other times and other places, and even, if one was lucky, to a place where there was no border between oneself and one's image in the mirror.

Amitav Ghosh / quote

10Undated

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 / quote

11Undated

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 / quote

12Undated

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

Amitav Ghosh / quote

13Undated

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

Amitav Ghosh / quote

14Undated

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.

Amitav Ghosh / quote

15Undated

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 / quote

16Undated

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 / quote

17Undated

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—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.

Amitav Ghosh / quote

18Undated

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

Amitav Ghosh / quote

19Undated

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

Amitav Ghosh / quote

20Undated

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 wasn't the CO. But that's how it always is. Whenever one of us doesn't get an appointment or a promotion, there's always a mist of regulations that makes things unclear. On the surface everything in the army appears to be ruled by manuals, regulations, procedures: it seems very cut and dried. But actually, underneath there are all these murky shadows that you can never quite see: prejudice, distrust, suspicion.

Amitav Ghosh / quote

21Undated

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 is not the same. It is without analogy for it is not comparable to the fear of nature, which is the most universal of human fears, nor to the fear of violence of the state, which is the commonest of modern fears. It is the fear that comes from the knowledge that normalcy is utterly contingent, that spaces that surround one, the streets that one inhabits, can become, suddenly and without warning, as hostile as a desert in a flash flood. It is this that sets apart the thousand million people who inhabit the subcontinent from the rest of the world - not language, not food, not music - it is the special quality of loneliness that grows out of the fear of the war between oneself and one's image in the mirror.

Amitav Ghosh / quote

22Undated

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 technocrats and so on if India achieved 'great power status'? What were the images evoked by this tag?Now, walking through this echoing old palace, looking at the pictures in the corridors, this aspiration took on, for the first time, the contours of an imagined reality. This is what the nuclearists wanted: to sign treaties, to be pictured with the world's powerful, to hang portraits on their walls, to become ancestors. On the bomb they had pinned their hopes of bringing it all back.

Amitav Ghosh / quote

23Undated

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 your dwelling and have nothing else to do but wait. The moments will not pass, the air hangs still and heavy; it is as though time itself has been slowed by the friction of fear.

Amitav Ghosh / quote