Arundhati Roy Quotes

The world's 'freeest' country has the highest number in prison.

Money need not be our only reward.

Peace, Inc. is sometimes as worrying as War, Inc. It's a way of managing public anger. We're all being managed, and we don't even know it.

Your enemies are always manufactured to suit your purpose, right? How can you have a good enemy? You have to have an utterly evil enemy - and then the evilness has to progress.

He held her as though she was a gift. Given to him in love. Something still and small. Unbearably precious.

That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much.

To stay quiet is as political an act as speaking out.

Her grief grieved her. His devastated her.

And the air was full of Thoughts and Things to Say. But at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. Big Things lurk unsaid inside.

Public support in the U.S. for the war against Iraq was founded on a multitiered edifice of falsehood and deceit, coordinated by the U.S. government and faithfully amplified by the corporate media.

This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt.

The NGO-ization of politics threatens to turn resistance into a well-mannered, reasonable, salaried, 9-to-5 job. With a few perks thrown in. Real resistance has real consequences. And no salary.

I am completely a loner. In my head I want to feel I can be anywhere. There is a sort of recklessness that being a loner allows me.

India lives in several centuries at the same time.

There are things that you can't do - like writing letters to a part of yourself. To your feet or hair. Or heart.

… he remained restrained and strangely composed. It was a composure born of extreme provocation. It stemmed from a lucidity that lies beyond rage.

And there it was again. Another religion turned against itself. Another edifice constructed by the human mind, decimated by human nature.

The Congress has historically played covert communal politics in order to create what in India we call vote banks where you pit one community against another and so on in order to secure votes.

the truth is that it's far easier to make a bomb than to educate four hundred million people.

I never do anything because I'm a celebrity, as a rule. I do what I do as a citizen.

If you want to control somebody, support them. Or marry them.

America is like some crazed, bewildered, rich giant bumbling around in a poor area with his pockets stuffed with money, and lots of weapons - just throwing stuff around.

Non-violence should be a tactic - not an ideology preached from the sidelines to victims of massive violence.

I don't want to be a victim. I don't want to disappear into the darkness.

People always loved best what they identified most with.

To call someone 'anti-American', indeed, to be anti-American, is not just racist, it's a failure of the imagination.

Of course, there's an alternative to terrorism: it's called justice.

Fiction is the most joyous, beautiful, sophisticated, wonderful thing in the world.

I am a Maoist sympathiser. I'm not a Maoist ideologue, because the communist movements in history have been just as destructive as capitalism.

Flat muscled and honey coloured. Sea secrets in his eyes. A silver raindrop in his ear.

Ever since the Great Depression, we know that one of the key ways in which the US economy has stimulated growth is by manufacturing weapons and exporting war to other countries.

Truly, there's no alternative to stupidity. Cretinism is the mother of fascism. I have no defence against it, really....

There is a war that makes us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.

As Estha stirred the thick jam he thought Two Thoughts and the Two Thoughts he thought were these: a) Anything can happen to anyone. and b) It is best to be prepared.

India is still flinching from a cultural insult, still looking for its identity.

Non-violence is a piece of theatre. You need an audience. What can you do when you have no audience?

Sometimes the state and the constitution are more enlightened than society.

In a country like India, the British were only able to rule the country because it had completely co-opted the elite of the country, who did their work for them.

By then Esthappen and Rahel had learned that the world had other ways of breaking men. They were already familiar with the smell. Sicksweet. Like old roses on a breeze.

She wore flowers in her hair and carried magic secrets in her eyes. She spoke to no one. She spent hours on the riverbank. She smoked cigarettes and had midnight swims.

In India, the poverty is so vast that the state cannot control it. It can beat people, but it can't prevent the poor from flooding the roads, the cities, the parks and railway station platforms.

In India, whichever language you write in, the possibility of people not understanding irony or not understanding [remains there]. This as a writer is most terrifying!

I am an artist and a writer, and I do think that one always places oneself in the picture to see where one fits.

There's no division on my bookshelf between fiction and nonfiction. As far as I'm concerned, fiction is about the truth.

History is really a study of the future, not the past.

When she listened to songs that she loved on the radio, something stirred inside her. A liquid ache spread under her skin, and she walked out of the world like a witch.

The only dream worth having, I told her, is to dream that you will live while you're alive and die only when you're dead.

But can we, should we, let apprehensions about the future immobilize us in the present?

His gratitude widened his smile and bent his back.

He could do only one thing at a time. If he held her, he couldn't kiss her. If he kissed her, he couldn't see her. If he saw her, he couldn't feel her.