The Glass Palace Quotes

“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, 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, 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, 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, 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, The Glass Palace

“There was no place more solitary than a dark room, with its murky light and fetid closeness.”
― Amitav Ghosh, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, The Glass Palace

“that politics has invaded everything, spared nothing . . . religion, art, family . . . it has taken over everything . . . there is no escape from it . . .”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Glass Palace

“How do you fight an enemy who fights from neither enmity nor anger but in submission to orders from superiors, without protest and without conscience?”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Glass Palace

“If you’re in command, it’s always your fault.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Glass Palace

“Beyond the ties of blood, friendship and immediate reciprocity, Rajkumar recognised no loyalties, no obligations and no limits on the compass of his right to provide for himself. He reserved his trust and affection for those who earned it by concrete example and proven goodwill. Once earned, his loyalty was given wholeheartedly, with none of those unspoken provisions with which people usually guard against betrayal. In this too he was not unlike a creature that had returned to the wild. But that there should exist a universe of loyalties that was unrelated to himself and his own immediate needs – this was very nearly incomprehensible.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Glass Palace

“This is how power is eclipsed: in a moment of vivid realism, between the waning of one fantasy of governance and its replacement by the next; in an instant when the world springs free of its mooring of dreams and reveals itself to be girdled in the pathways of survival and self-preservation. The”
― Amitav Ghosh, 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? CHAPTER 37 When”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Glass Palace

“Her mind seemed to have no room for anything but the crowded eventlessness of her everyday life.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Glass Palace

“Fear had played no part in any of this. He had never thought of his life as different from any other; he had never experienced the slightest doubt about his personal sovereignty; never imagined himself to be dealing with anything other than the full range of human choice. 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, The Glass Palace

“that he was about to black out and he was glad: at that moment there was nothing he wanted more than oblivion. CHAPTER 36 Even though he was following the news closely on the radio, Dinu had trouble understanding exactly what was under way in northern Malaya. The bulletins mentioned a major engagement in the region of Jitra but the reports were inconclusive and confusing. In the meantime, there were other indications of the way the war was going, all of them ominous. One of these was an official newspaper announcement listing the closing of certain post offices in the north. Another was the increasing volume of southbound traffic: a stream of evacuees was pouring down the north–south highway in the direction of Singapore. One day, on a visit to Sungei Pattani, Dinu had a glimpse of this exodus. The evacuees seemed to consist mainly of the families of planters and mining engineers. Their cars and trucks were filled with household objects—furniture, trunks, suitcases. He came across a truck that was loaded with a refrigerator, a dog and an upright piano. He spoke to the man who was driving the truck: he was a Dutchman, the manager of a rubber plantation near Jitra. His family was sitting crowded in the truck’s cab: his wife, a newborn baby and two girls. The Dutchman said he’d managed to get out just ahead of the Japanese. His advice to Dinu was to leave as soon as possible—not to make the mistake of waiting until the last minute. That night, at Morningside, Dinu told Alison exactly what the Dutchman had said. They looked at each other in silence: they had been over the subject several times before. They knew they had very few choices. If they went by road, one of them would have to stay behind—the estate’s truck was in no shape to make the long journey to Singapore and the Daytona would not be able to carry more than two passengers over the”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Glass Palace

“The old loyalties of India, the ancient ones – they’d been destroyed long ago; the British had built their Empire by effacing them.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Glass Palace

“and that’s why it’s so hard for them when they discover that this equality they’ve been told about is a carrot on a stick – something that’s dangled in front of their noses to keep them going, but always kept just out of reach.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Glass Palace

“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, The Glass Palace

“Her mind seemed to have no room for anything but the crowded eventlessness of her everyday life. It struck her that she rarely gave any thought to such questions as freedom or liberty or any other such matters.”
― Amitav Ghosh, 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, 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, The Glass Palace