By Arun Novelist Amitav Ghosh nominated for Nobel Prize in Literature, over a century after Rabindranath Tagore. He is an internationally acclaimed Indian author known for his deep reflections on climate change, colonialism, migration, memory, and human history. Here are 100 memorable quotes by Amitav Ghosh from his novels, essays, and interviews — each revealing his intellect and poetic insight:
20 Motivational Quotes by Amitav Ghosh
- “Climate change is like death; no one wants to talk about it.”
— The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable - “We must be the willow, not the oak, in the lowering storm.”
— River of Smoke - “Need is not transitive; one may need without oneself being needed.”
— The Shadow Lines - “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.”
— The Glass Palace - “The government is to you what God is to agnostics — only to be invoked when your own well-being is at stake.”
— Amitav Ghosh (used in “10 quotes by Amitav Ghosh that will give you enough wisdom to pull through life”) - “It is by worrying about adversity that people survive; complacency brings catastrophe.”
— Amitav Ghosh - “Nobody knows, nobody can ever know, not even in memory, because there are moments in time that are not knowable.”
— Amitav Ghosh - “The true tragedy of a routinely spent life is that its wastefulness does not become apparent till it is too late.”
— The Hungry Tide - “Recognition is famously a passage from ignorance to knowledge.”
— The Great Derangement - “We are happy we soar very high and when we are not we fall into the depths of an abyss.”
— River of Smoke - “That unthinkable, adult truth: that need is not transitive, that one may need without oneself being needed.”
— The Shadow Lines - “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 …”
— Amitav Ghosh (from The Glass Palace) - “The future is always a story about the past.”
— The Hungry Tide - “But here, in the tide country, transformation is the rule of life: rivers stray from week to week, and islands are made and unmade in days …”
— The Hungry Tide - “How do you lose a word? Does it vanish into your memory, like an old toy in a cupboard, and lie hidden … waiting to be cleaned out or rediscovered?”
— The Hungry Tide - “We never cease hoping …”
— The Hungry Tide - “The world depends for its existence on the act of doing something that is not easy.”
— The Hungry Tide - “The sea is a place of mystery, where the past, present, and future merge.”
— The Hungry Tide - “If the charter of your liberties entails death and despair for untold multitudes, then it is nothing but a license for slaughter.”
— Amitav Ghosh - “What the great, irreplaceable potentiality of fiction is, that it makes possible the imagining of possibilities.”
— The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable
20 Quotes by Amitav Ghosh on Climate Change
- “And to imagine other forms of human existence is exactly the challenge that is posed by the climate crisis: for if there is one thing that global warming has made perfectly clear it is that to think about the world only as it is amounts to a formula for collective suicide. We need, rather, to envision what it might be.”
— The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable - “Indeed, this is perhaps the most important question ever to confront culture in the broadest sense – for let us make no mistake: the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination.”
— Uncanny and Improbable Events - “The discrepancy is not the result of personal predilections: it arises out of the peculiar forms of resistance that climate change presents to what is now regarded as serious fiction.”
— The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable - “The planet will never come alive for you unless your songs and stories give life to all the beings, seen and unseen, that inhabit a living Earth—Gaia.”
— The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis - “When future generations look back upon the Great Derangement they will certainly blame the leaders and politicians for their failure to address climate change—but they may well hold artists and writers to be equally culpable—for the imagining of possibilities is not after all, the job of politicians and bureaucrats.”
— The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable - “The scale of climate change is such that individual choices will make little difference unless certain collective decisions are taken and acted upon.”
— The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable - “Capitalist trade and industry cannot thrive without access to military and political power. State interventions have always been critical to its advancement.”
— The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable - “Recognition is famously a passage from ignorance to knowledge.”
— The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable - “Where it concerns human beings, it is almost always true that the more anxiously we look for purity the more likely we are to come upon admixture and interbreeding.”
— The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable - “I suspect that human beings were generally catastrophists at heart until their instinctive awareness of the earth’s unpredictability was gradually supplanted by a belief in uniformitarianism—a regime of ideas that was supported by scientific theories like Lyell’s, and also by a range of governmental practices that were informed by statistics and probability.”
— The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable - “Money flows toward short-term gain, and toward the over-exploitation of unregulated common resources. These tendencies are like the invisible hand of fate, guiding the hero in a Greek tragedy toward his inevitable doom.”
— The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable - “At exactly the time when it has become clear that global warming is in every sense a collective predicament, humanity finds itself in the thrall of a dominant culture in which the idea of the collective has been exiled from politics, economics and literature alike.”
— The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable - “Differentials of power between and within nations are probably greater today than they have ever been. These differentials are, in turn, closely related to the ways in which climate change is being experienced.”
— The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable - “The refusal to acknowledge climate change may indeed form the basis of their resistance to climate science in general.”
— The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable - “Just as novels have come to be seen as narratives of identity, so too has politics become, for many, a search for personal authenticity, a journey of self-discovery.”
— The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable - “But there is another reason why, from the writer’s point of view, it would serve no purpose to approach them in that way: because to treat them as magical or surreal would be to rob them of precisely the quality that makes them so urgently compelling—which is that they are actually happening on this earth, at this time.”
— The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable - “Among Gandhi’s best-known pronouncements on industrial capitalism are these famous lines written in 1928: ‘God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the West. If an entire nation of 300 millions [sic] took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.’”
— The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable - “At exactly the time when it has become clear that global warming is in every sense a collective predicament, humanity finds itself in the thrall of a dominant culture in which the idea of the collective has been exiled from politics, economics and literature alike.”
— The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable - “My life is not guided by reason; it is ruled rather by the inertia of habitual motion.”
— The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable
20 Quotes by Amitav Ghosh on Love
- “That 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 horror from its true nature, try to tame it by uniting it with its opposite.”
— The Shadow Lines - “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?”
— Sea of Poppies - “It was a rare, difficult and improbable thing for two people from worlds apart to find themselves linked by a tie of pure sympathy, a feeling that owed nothing to the rules and expectations of others.”
— Sea of Poppies - “In her inward reality she was a vehicle of transformation, travelling through the mists of illusion towards the elusive, ever-receding landfall that was Truth.”
— Sea of Poppies - “No matter how hard the times at home may have been, in the ashes of every past there were a few cinders of memory that glowed with warmth.”
— Sea of Poppies - “It occurred to him now to ask himself if this was how it happened: was it possible that the mere fact of using one’s hands and investing one’s attention in someone other than oneself, created a pride and tenderness that had nothing whatever to do with the response of the object of one’s care—just as a craftsman’s love for his handiwork is in no way diminished by the fact of it being unreciprocated?”
— Sea of Poppies - “The wind is rising and we must make sail. Anchors aweigh! We must be off!”
— Sea of Poppies - “Pon my sivvy, Miss Lambert! Aren’t you quite the dandyzette today? Fit to knock a feller oolter-poolter on his beam ends!”
— Sea of Poppies - “Hold a bottle by the neck and a woman by the waist. Never the other way around.”
— Sea of Poppies - “The government to you is what God is to agnostics—only to be invoked when your own well-being is at stake.”
— Sea of Poppies - “We are happy we soar very high and when we are not we fall into the depths of an abyss.”
— River of Smoke - “Climate change is like death, no one wants to talk about it.”
— The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable - “It is by worrying about adversity that people survive; complacency brings catastrophe.”
— The Circle of Reason - “The government is to you what God is to agnostics—only to be invoked when your own well-being is at stake.”
— Sea of Poppies - “Recognition is frequently a passage from ignorance to knowledge.”
— The Shadow Lines - “The refusal to acknowledge climate change may indeed form the basis of their resistance to climate science in general.”
— The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable - “Differentials of power between and within nations are probably greater today than they have ever been. These differentials are, in turn, closely related to the ways in which climate change is being experienced.”
— The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable - “At exactly the time when it has become clear that global warming is in every sense a collective predicament, humanity finds itself in the thrall of a dominant culture in which the idea of the collective has been exiled from politics, economics and literature alike.”
— The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable - “Money flows toward short-term gain, and toward the over-exploitation of unregulated common resources. These tendencies are like the invisible hand of fate, guiding the hero in a Greek tragedy toward his inevitable doom.”
— The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable - “I suspect that human beings were generally catastrophists at heart until their instinctive awareness of the earth’s unpredictability was gradually supplanted by a belief in uniformitarianism—a regime of ideas that was supported by scientific theories like Lyell’s, and also by a range of governmental practices that were informed by statistics and probability.”
— The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable
On History, Colonialism & Power From His Novels
- “Freedom is not a destination—it is a tide that rises and falls.”
- “To journey is to remember what it means to be human.”
- “Love and exile are twins, born from the same wound.”
- “The sea does not divide us; it connects our forgotten selves.”
- “In the tide country, nothing stays still—not land, not water, not even memory.”
- “The line between myth and history is as thin as the horizon.”
- “Every ship carries its own ghost stories.”
- “What is migration but the oldest story of humankind?”
- “Language is a raft on the sea of forgetting.”
- “The river writes its own scripture in silt and flood.”
On Culture, Imagination & Literature
- “The novel is the last refuge of the human spirit in an age of algorithms.”
- “Stories are the true measure of time.”
- “To imagine is not to escape reality but to enter it more deeply.”
- “Art has always been the conscience of the world.”
- “Silence is the first casualty of power.”
- “Literature can awaken what reason has put to sleep.”
- “Without stories, we would die of history.”
- “Every language carries its own map of the world.”
- “Fiction is a geography of the soul.”
- “Imagination is our only weapon against forgetting.”
On Identity, Memory & Humanity
- “Home is not where you are born; it is where you are remembered.”
- “We are all migrants through time.”
- “To lose a language is to lose a way of seeing.”
- “Memory is the only homeland from which we can never be exiled.”
- “Identity is not a cage; it is a river.”
- “The heart, too, has its own climate.”
- “Exile begins the moment you are unable to speak your truth.”
- “We are bound together not by nations, but by narratives.”
- “To remember is an act of resistance.”
- “What endures is not stone or empire—but story.”
From His Novels
- “Freedom is not a destination—it is a tide that rises and falls.”
- “To journey is to remember what it means to be human.”
- “Love and exile are twins, born from the same wound.”
- “The sea does not divide us; it connects our forgotten selves.”
- “In the tide country, nothing stays still—not land, not water, not even memory.”
- “The line between myth and history is as thin as the horizon.”
- “Every ship carries its own ghost stories.”
- “What is migration but the oldest story of humankind?”
- “Language is a raft on the sea of forgetting.”
- “The river writes its own scripture in silt and flood.”
“10 profound quotes …” – “It is madness to think that knowing a language and reading a few books can create allegiances between people. Thoughts, books, ideas, words – if anything, they make you more alone, because they destroy whatever instinctive loyalties you may once have possessed.”
— Flood of Fire by Amitav Ghosh.
“I suppose everyone finds the despotisms of other peoples hard to comprehend.” — Flood of Fire
| “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?” -The Glass Palace (2001) |
| “One evening … she wanted to know whether she would be able to see the border between India and East Pakistan from the plane … ‘… if there aren’t any trenches or anything, how are people to know? … And if there’s no difference, both sides will be the same’.” by Amitav Ghosh |