Ten of My Favourite Amitav Ghosh Quotes
Quotes, who doesn’t love a good quote? This series of articles we look at Top 10 Famous Quotes by Author Amitav Ghosh, author quotes are always a challenge and fun to pick, with Amitav Ghosh you will find my Ten favourites of Amitav Ghosh’s quotes.
Popular Quotes
“Hold a bottle by the neck and a woman by the waist. Never the other way around”.”
― Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies
“[T]hat state, love, is so utterly alien to that other idea without which we cannot live as human beings — the idea of justice. It is only because love is so profoundly the enemy of justice that our minds, shrinking in horor from its true nature, try to tame it by uniting it with its opposite […] in the hope that if we apply all the metaphors of normality, that if we heap them high enough, we shall, in the end, be able to approximate that state metaphorically.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines
“(He) was in love with the idea of revolution. Men like that, even when they turn their backs on their party and their comrades, can never let go of the idea: it’s the secret god that rules their hearts. It is what makes them come alive; they revel in the danger, the exquisite pain. It is to them what childbirth is to a woman, or war to a mercenary.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide
“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, Sea of Poppies
“What would it be like if I had something to defend – a home, a country, a family – and I found myself attacked by these ghostly men, these trusting boys? How do you fight an enemy who fights with neither enmity nor anger but in submission to orders from superiors, without protest and without conscience?”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Glass Palace
“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, The Shadow Lines
“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, The Hungry Tide
“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, The Glass Palace
“The government to you is what God is to agnostics–only to be invoked when your own well being is at stake.”
― Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies
“That unthinkable, adult truth: that need is not transitive, that one may need without oneself being needed.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines
10 Famous Quotes by Author Amitav Ghosh
So there you have it my Ten favourite quotes by Amitav Ghosh, please comment below and share your favourite quotes by the fantastic author Amitav Ghosh. Furthermore, if you find any Authors not covered for there, top 10 quotes let me know and I will review their works and find some of their best quotes as has been done here for Amitav Ghosh.
One Final Bonus – Amitav Ghosh Quote
“There is something strikingly different about the quality of photographs of that time. It has nothing to do with age or colour, or the feel of paper. . . . In modern family photographs the camera pretends to circulate like a friend, clicking its shutters at those moments when its subjects have disarranged themselves to present to it those postures which they would like to think of as informal. But in pictures of that time, the camera is still a public and alien eye, faced with which people feel bound either to challenge the intrusion by striking postures of defiant hilarity, or else to compose their faces, and straighten their shoulders, not always formally, but usually with just that hint of stiffness which suggests a public face.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines
