103 Quotes by Amitav Ghosh

I suppose everyone finds the despotisms of other peoples hard to comprehend.

But there is another reason why, from the writer’s point of view, it would serve no purpose to approach them in that way: because to treat them as magical or surreal would be to rob them of precisely the quality that makes them so urgently compelling – which is that they are actually happening on this earth, at this time.

Insofar as the idea of the limitlessness of human freedom is central to the arts of our time, this is also where the Anthropocene will most intransigently resist them.

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.