"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, ..."
- Amitav Ghosh
"I was already well schooled in looking away, the jungle-craft of gentility."
"Speech was only a bag of tricks that fooled you into believing that you could see through the eyes of another being."
"This is my gift to you, this story that is also a song, these words that are a part of Fokir. Such flaws as there are in my rendition of it I do not regret, for perhaps they will prevent me from fadin..."
"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?"
"In the old days, farmers would keep a little of their home-made opium for their families, to be used during illnesses, or at harvests and weddings; the rest they would sell to the local nobility, or t..."
"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."
"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 unthinkable, adult truth: that need is not transitive, that one may need without oneself being needed."
"Need is not transitive, one may need without oneself being needed."