103 Quotes by Amitav Ghosh

That happens you know, as you grow older – you can’t tell the dreams from the memories.

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.

Well sir, if slavery is freedom then I’m glad I don’t have to make a meal of it. Whips and chains are not much to my taste.

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.

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

If the charter of your liberties entails death and despair for untold multitudes, then it is nothing but a license for slaughter.

It is by worrying about adversity that people survive; complacency brings catastrophe.

That which a man takes for himself no one can deny him.

No matter how hard the times at home may have been, in the ashes of every past there were a few cinders of memory that glowed with warmth –...