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

— Amitav Ghosh

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

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

— Amitav Ghosh

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

— Amitav Ghosh

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

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

— Amitav Ghosh

She remembered a word he'd often used, Karina-one of the Buddha's words, Pale 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 Karina means, and from that moment on, your lives will never again be the same.

— Amitav Ghosh

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

— Amitav Ghosh

That particular fear has the texture you can neither forget nor describe. It is like the fear of the victims of an earthquake, of people who have lost faith in the stillness of the earth. And yet it is not the same. It is without analogy for it is not comparable to the fear of nature, which is the most universal of human fears, nor to the fear of violence of the state, which is the commonest of modern fears. It is the fear that comes from the knowledge that normalcy is utterly contingent, that spaces that surround one, the streets that one inhabits, can become, suddenly and without warning, as hostile as a desert in a flash flood. Furthermore, it is this that sets apart the thousand million people who inhabit the subcontinent from the rest of the world - not language, not food, not music - it is the special quality of loneliness that grows out of the fear of the war between oneself and one's image in the mirror.

— Amitav Ghosh

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

— Amitav Ghosh