Arundhati Roy Quotes

Heaven opened and the water hammered down, reviving the reluctant old well, greenmossing the pigless pigsty, carpet bombing still, tea-colored puddles the way memory bombs still, tea-colored minds.

The revolution cannot be funded. It's not the imagination of trusts and foundations that's going to bring real change.

I could weep for a river-valley, and I have. But for a country? Oh man, I don't know.

I sometimes think I was perhaps the only girl in India whose mother said, "Whatever you do, don't get married". For me, when I see a bride, it gives me a rash. I find them ghoulish, almost.

An old-growth forest, a mountain range or a river valley is more important and certainly more loveable than any country will ever be.

The writer is the midwife of understanding.

I'm not somebody who plans my life. In fact, I don't know what's going to happen here in India, it's such a strange climate here at the moment. So very worrying.

Human beings seem unable to live without war, but they are also unable to live without love.

Indian intellectuals today feel radical when they condemn fundamentalism, but not many people are talking about the links between privatization, globalization, and fundamentalism.

When I'm outside the cities I do feel optimistic. There is such grandeur in India and so much beauty.

India's a very interesting place... there's no formal opposition, but there's genuine on-the-ground opposition.

The people who are getting rich can't imagine that the world is not a better place.

Cage the People, Free the Money. The only thing that is allowed to move freely - unimpeded - around the world today is money... capital.

Election campaigns seem to siphon away political anger and even basic political intelligence into this great vaudeville, after which we all end up in exactly the same place.

Human rights takes history out of justice.

Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things. And here we are with our crash helmets on, with concertina wire all around us.

Humans are animals of habit.

I think my eyes were knocked open and they don't close. I sometimes wish I could close them and look away.

If you're not religious, then look at it this way. This world of ours is four thousand, six hundred million years old. It could end in an afternoon.

Nilekani's technocratic obsession with gathering data is consistent with that of Bill Gates, as though lack of information is what is causing world hunger.

Thousands are losing their jobs and homes, while corporations are being bailed out with billions of dollars.

The great irony is that people who live in remote areas, who are illiterate and don't own TVs, are in some ways more free because they are beyond the reach of indoctrination by the modern mass media.

The idea of "human rights," for example - sometimes it bothers me. Not in itself, but because the concept of human rights has replaced the much grander idea of justice.

There is nothing that pleases me more than a beautiful sentence ... It is something that satisfies me.

Once you've seen certain things, you can't un-see them, and seeing nothing is as political an act as seeing something.

Three-quarters of India lives on the edge of the market economy. You can't tell them that only those who can afford water can have it.

I need fiction like you need to eat or exercise.

Pointed in the wrong direction, trapped outside their own history and unable to retrace their steps because their footprints had been swept away.

I'm an activist; I have to be angry all the time. That's what we do!

Margaret Kochamma's tiny, ordered life relinquished itself to this truly baroque bedlam with the quiet gasp of a warm body entering a chilly sea.

The U.S. corporate media, otherwise known as the "free press," is that hollow pillar on which contemporary American democracy rests.

Let's leave one alive so that it can be lonely.

They looked at each other. They weren't thinking anymore. The time for that had come and gone. Smashed smiles lay ahead of them. But that would be later. Lay Ter.

I've never been that person who thought that because I've written one novel, I should write another and another. It's only when there was another novel to write that I was going to write another.

As I keep saying, fiction is truth. I think fiction is the truest thing there ever was.

I think that I was quite a grown-up child, and I have been a pretty childish adult.

It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that is purloined.

It's so frightening, the nationalism in the air.

Here they learned to Wait. To Watch. To think thoughts and not voice them.

Smells, like music, hold memories. She breathed deep, and bottled it up for posterity.

Going to Oxford didn't necessarily make a person clever.

Madness slunk in through a chink in History. It only took a moment.

The minute what you think of as radical becomes an institutionalised, funded operation, you're in some trouble.

The UID is a corporate scam which funnels billions of dollars into the IT sector

Poverty is a crime and the poor are terrorists

Snowden is the thoughtful, courageous saint of liberal reform. And Julian Assange is a sort of radical, feral prophet who has been prowling this wilderness since he was 16 years old.

One beach-colored. One brown. One Loved. One Loved a Little Less.

One of the reasons some people get so angry with me is because I have the space now that a lot of others who think like me don't.

Old. A viable die-able age.

Stable markets, unstable world. Efficiency. Everybody hears about it. It's enough to make you want to be pro-inefficiency and pro-corruption.