103 Quotes by Amitav Ghosh

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.

It would be enough; as an alibi for a life, it would do; she would not need to apologize for how she had spent her time on this earth.

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.

in Bengal it was so easy to know who was who; more often than not, just to hear someone's name would reveal their religion, their caste, their village. Foreigners were, by comparison, so opaque: it was impossible to speculate about them.

L'oppio inonderà il mercato come un diluvio monsonico

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

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.

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

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.