103 Quotes by Amitav Ghosh

(...) it seemed to me exceedingly peculiar that a man should love flowers as well as opium - and yet I see now that there is no contradiction in this, for are they not perhaps both a means to a kind of intoxication ? Could it not even be said that one might lead inevitably to the other ?

[T]he great, irreplaceable potentiality of fiction is that it makes possible the imagining of possibilities.

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

People think that knowing the future can help you prepare for what is to come - but often it only makes you powerless.

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

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.

Why should we try, why not just take the world as it is? I told her how he had said that we had to try because the alternative wasn’t blankness – it only meant that if we didn’t try ourselves, we would never be free of other people’s inventions.

... there was a land of sugar, where everything was sweet; and also a country made of cloth, and an island of chains.