"Nobody knows, nobody can ever know, not even in memory, because there are moments in time that are not knowable."
- Amitav Ghosh
"I had a book in my hands to while away the time and it occurred to me that in a way a landscape is not unlike a book - a compilation of pages that overlap without two ever being the same. People open ..."
"Is it your implication that no good will come of this expedition?’‘Oh it will, sir; there’s no denying that.’ Captain Chillingworth’s words emerged very slowly, as if they had been pulled up from a de..."
"How had it happened that when choosing the men and women who were to be torn from this subjugated plain, the hand of destiny had stayed so far inland, away from the busy coastlines, to alight on the p..."
"I could not persuade her that a place does not merely exist, that it has to be invented in one's imagination."
"People like my grandmother, who have no home but in memory, learn to be very skilled in the art of recollection."
"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 ..."
"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."
"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,..."
"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."