“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, quote from The Glass Palace
“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, quote from The Glass Palace
“Was this how a mutiny was sparked? In a moment of heedlessness, so that one became a stranger to the person one had been a moment before? Or was it the other way around? That this was when one recognized the stranger that one had always been to oneself; that all one’s loyalties and beliefs had been misplaced?”
― Amitav Ghosh, quote from The Glass Palace
“In a way the better the master;the worse the condition of slave,because it makes him forget what he is.”
― Amitav Ghosh, quote from The Glass Palace
“He said: 'You don't understand. We never thought that we were being used to conquer people. Not at all: we thought the opposite. We were told that we were freeing those people. That is what they said—that we were going to set those people free from their bad kings or their evil customs or some such thing. We believed it because they believed it too. It took us a long time to understand that in their eyes freedom exists wherever they rule.”
― Amitav Ghosh, quote from The Glass Palace
“There was no place more solitary than a dark room, with its murky light and fetid closeness.”
― Amitav Ghosh, quote from The Glass Palace
“She had talked of this at length with Kadambari—Mrs. Dutt: Why should it not be possible for these freedoms to be universally available for women everywhere? And Mrs. Dutt had said that of course, this was one of the great benefits of British rule in India; that it had given women rights and protections that they’d never had before. At this, Uma had felt herself, for the first time, falling utterly out of sympathy with her new friend. She had known instinctively that this was a false argument, unfounded and illogical. How was it possible to imagine that one could grant freedom by imposing subjugation? that one could open a cage by pushing it inside a bigger cage? How could any section of a people hope to achieve freedom where the entirety of a populace was held in subjection?”
― Amitav Ghosh, quote from The Glass Palace
“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, quote from The Glass Palace
“I don't remember much, which is a kind of mercy,I suppose. I see it in patterns.
Sometimes it's like a scribble on a wall- no matter how many times you paint over it, a bit of it always comes through, but not enough to put together the whole.
I try not to think about it too much.”
― Amitav Ghosh, quote from The Glass Palace
“There seemed never to be a moment when he was not haunted by the fear of being thought lacking by his British colleagues. And yet it seemed to be universally agreed that he was one of the most successful Indians of his generation, a model for his countrymen. Did this mean that one day all of India would become a shadow of what he had been? Millions of people trying to live their lives in conformity with incomprehensible rules? Better to be what Dolly had been: a woman who had no illusions about the nature of her condition; a prisoner who knew the exact dimensions of her cage and could look for contentment within those confines.”
― Amitav Ghosh, quote from The Glass Palace
“Why don’t they complain?"
"They do sometimes. But usually there's nothing in particular to complain about. Take the case of Hardy's appointment: Who was to blame? Hardy himself? The men? It certainly wasn't the CO. But that's how it always is. Whenever one of us doesn't get an appointment or a promotion, there's always a mist of regulations that makes things unclear. On the surface everything in the army appears to be ruled by manuals, regulations, procedures: it seems very cut and dried. But actually, underneath there are all these murky shadows that you can never quite see: prejudice, distrust, suspicion.”
― Amitav Ghosh, quote from The Glass Palace
“In a further effort to be helpful, I tried to pry the dentures apart. But Rajkumar had grown impatient and he snatched the tumbler from me. It was only after he had thrust his teeth into his mouth that he discovered that Uma's dentures were clamped within his. And then, as he was sitting there, staring in round-eyed befuddlement at the pink jaws that were protruding out of his own, an astonishing thing happened - Uma leaned forward and fastened her mouth on her own teeth. Their mouths clung to each other and they shut their eyes.”
― Amitav Ghosh, quote from The Glass Palace
“But if it were true that his life had somehow been molded by acts of power of which he was unaware—then it would follow that he had never acted of his own volition; never had a moment of true self-consciousness. Everything he had ever assumed about himself was a lie, an illusion. And if this were so, how was he to find himself now?”
― Amitav Ghosh, quote from The Glass Palace
“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.”
― Amitav Ghosh, quote from The Glass Palace
“If there was an implicit self-hatred in trusting only your own, then how much deeper was the self-loathing that led a group of men to distrust someone for no reason other than that he was one of them?”
― Amitav Ghosh, quote from The Glass Palace
“Some nine years before, Mr. Tan Chay Yan, scion of a well-known Peranakan Chinese family of Malacca, had converted his pepper garden into a rubber plantation. In 1897 this had seemed like a mad thing to do. Everyone had advised against it: rubber was known to be a risk. Mr. Ridley, the curator of the Singapore Botanical Gardens, had been trying for years to interest British planters in giving rubber a try. The imperial authorities in London had spent a fortune in arranging to have seed stocks stolen from Brazil.”
― Amitav Ghosh, quote from The Glass Palace
Amitav Ghosh
Born place: in Calcutta, India
Born date July 11, 1956
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“He had Oly letter a little card that he taped on his wall. The thing read, ‘The only liars bigger than the quack are the quack’s patients.’ Arty used to just keep me in stitches. Eleven years old he was then.”
― Katherine Dunn, quote from Geek Love
“I wish you hadn't been so over-courteous about putting the inscription on a card instead of on the flyleaf. It's the bookseller coming out in you all, you were afraid you'd decrease its value. You would have increased it for the present owner. (And possibly for the future owner. I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading passages someone long gone has called my attention to.)”
― Helene Hanff, quote from 84, Charing Cross Road
“We can never understand. We can only try, fumbling our way through the tunneled places, reaching for light.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Pandemonium
“Personal growth must sometimes be measured by distance travelled rather than by current position”
― Andrew Davidson, quote from The Gargoyle
“Treat a man as he is and he will remain as he is. Treat a man as he can and should be and
he will become as he can and should be.”
― Stephen R. Covey, quote from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change
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