103 Quotes by Amitav Ghosh

This is how power is eclipsed: in a moment of vivid realism, between the waning of one fantasy of governance and its replacement by the next; in an instant when the world springs free of its mooring of dreams and reveals itself to be girdled in the pathways of survival and self-preservation. The.

Chasing the dragon is an art, you know – it must be done properly.

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

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.

If whole societies and polities are to adapt then the necessary decisions will need to be made collectively, within political institutions, as happens in wartime or national emergencies. After all, isn’t that what politics, in its most fundamental form, is about? Collective survival and the preservation of the body politic?

How was it that no one had ever told her that it was not love itself, but its treacherous gatekeepers which made the greatest demands on your courage: the panic of acknowledging it; the terror of declaring it; the fear of being rebuffed? Why had no one told her that love’s twin was not hate but cowardice?

I suspect that human beings were generally catastrophists at heart until their instinctive awareness of the earth’s unpredictability was gradually supplanted by a belief in uniformitarianism – a regime of ideas that was supported by scientific theories like Lyell’s, and also by a range of governmental practices that were informed by statistics and probability.

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.

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?