Top 90 Amitav Ghosh Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The government to you is what God is to agnostics – only to be invoked when your own well being is at stake.”

— Amitav Ghosh

2. “But here, in the tide country, transformation is the rule of life: rivers stray from week to week, and islands are made and unmade in days. In other places forests take centuries, even millennia, to regenerate; but mangroves can recolonize a denuded island in ten to fifteen years. Could it be the very rhythms of the earth were quickened here so that they unfolded at an accelerated pace?”

— Amitav Ghosh

3. “We must be the willow, not the oak, in the lowering storm.”

— Amitav Ghosh

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

— Amitav Ghosh

5. “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.”

— Amitav Ghosh

6. “Need is not transitive, one may need without oneself being needed.”

— Amitav Ghosh

7. “The truth is, sir, that men do what their power permits them to do. We are no different from the Pharaohs or the Mongols: the difference is only that when we kill people we feel compelled to pretend that it is for some higher cause. It is this pretence of virtue, I promise you, that will never be forgiven by history.”

— Amitav Ghosh

8. “To want to be ahead, and to celebrate and mythify this endeavor, is indeed one of the most powerful impulses of modernity itself.”

— Amitav Ghosh

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

— Amitav Ghosh

10. “And to no one is this state more attractive than to those whom it is consistently denied.”

— Amitav Ghosh

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

— Amitav Ghosh

12. “Hold a bottle by the neck and a woman by the waist. Never the other way around”.”

— Amitav Ghosh

13. “Recognition is famously a passage from ignorance to knowledge.”

— Amitav Ghosh

14. “I know nothing of this silence except that it lies outside the reach of my intelligence, beyond words – that is why this silence must win, must inevitably defeat me, because it is not a presence at all.”

— Amitav Ghosh

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

— Amitav Ghosh

16. “How do you lose a word? Does it vanish into your memory, like an old toy in a cupboard, and lie hidden in the cobwebs and dust, waiting to be cleaned out or rediscovered?”

— Amitav Ghosh

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

— Amitav Ghosh

18. “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.”

— Amitav Ghosh

19. “Similarly, at exactly the time when it has become clear that global warming is in every sense a collective predicament, humanity finds itself in the thrall of a dominant culture in which the idea of the collective has been exiled from politics, economics, and literature alike.”

— Amitav Ghosh

20. “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?”

— Amitav Ghosh

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

— Amitav Ghosh

22. “That unthinkable, adult truth: that need is not transitive, that one may need without oneself being needed.”

— Amitav Ghosh

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

— Amitav Ghosh

24. “The true tragedy of routinely spent life is that its wastefulness does not become apparent till it is too late.”

— Amitav Ghosh

25. “The hours are slow in passing as they always are when you are waiting in fear for you know not what: I am reminded of the moments before the coming of a cyclone, when you have barricaded yourself into your dwelling and have nothing else to do but wait. The moments will not pass, the air hangs still and heavy; it is as though time itself has been slowed by the friction of fear.”

— Amitav Ghosh

26. “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 –...”

— Amitav Ghosh

27. “I was already well schooled in looking away, the jungle-craft of gentility.”

— Amitav Ghosh

28. “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.”

— Amitav Ghosh

29. “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.”

— Amitav Ghosh

30. “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.”

— Amitav Ghosh

31. “I thought of how much they all wanted to be free; how they went mad wanting their freedom; I began to wonder whether it was I that was mad because I was happy to be bound; whether I was alone in knowing that I could not live without the clamour of the voices within me.”

— Amitav Ghosh

32. “I wanted to watch her walking, unselfconscious, for as long as possible.”

— Amitav Ghosh

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

— Amitav Ghosh

34. “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.”

— Amitav Ghosh

35. “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?”

— Amitav Ghosh

36. “There was no place more solitary than a dark room, with its murky light and fetid closeness.”

— Amitav Ghosh

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

— Amitav Ghosh

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

— Amitav Ghosh

39. “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.”

— Amitav Ghosh

40. “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.”

— Amitav Ghosh

41. “At the same time, it has also reinforced the mind-body dualism to the point of producing the illusion, so powerfully propagated in cyberspace, that human beings have freed themselves from their material circumstances to the point where they have become floating personalities “decoupled from a body.”

— Amitav Ghosh

42. “Pon my sivvy, Miss Lambert! Aren’t you quite the dandyzette today? Fit to knock a feller oolter-poolter on his beam ends!”

— Amitav Ghosh

43. “Significant sections of the electorate probably understand that climate change negotiations may have the effect of changing their country’s standing in the world’s hierarchies of power as well as wealth: this may indeed form the basis of their resistance to climate science in general. The refusal to.”

— Amitav Ghosh

44. “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.”

— Amitav Ghosh

45. “It’s something you don’t see until it’s gone-the shapes and things have and the ways in which the people around you mould the shapes.”

— Amitav Ghosh

46. “With every step her carriage seemed to become a little straighter and her movements more assured: it was as though the mere proximity of the building had caused a brisk professional to emerge from the chrysalis of a careworn wife and mother.”

— Amitav Ghosh

47. “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?”

— Amitav Ghosh

48. “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.”

— Amitav Ghosh

49. “The memories were so vivid that the book dropped from my hand and my eyes filled with tears.”

— Amitav Ghosh

50. “Where it concerns human beings, it is almost always true that the more anxiously we look for purity the more likely we are to come upon admixture and interbreeding.”

— Amitav Ghosh