Arundhati Roy Quotes

Humbling was a nice word, Rahel thought. Humbling along without a care in the world

To understand history,' Chacko said, 'we have to go inside and listen to what they're saying. And look at the books and the pictures on the wall. And smell the smells.

Wars are never fought for altruistic reasons.

I stand by what I write and follow through on what I write.

Dams are the temples of secular India and almost worshipped. They are huge, wet cement flags that wave in our minds. They're the symbol of nationalism to many.

Globalization means standardization. The very rich and the very poor must want the same things, but only the rich can have them.

The moment I saw her, a part of me walked out of my body and wrapped itself around her. And there it still remains.

There seems to be no hope. But pretending to be hopeful is the only grace we have . . .

Her collarbones like wings that spread from the base of her throat to the ends of her shoulders. A bird held down by skin.

Normalcy was declared. (Normalcy was always a declaration.)

Life went on. Death went on. The war went on.

To understand history, ' Chacko said, 'we have to go inside and listen to what they're saying. And look at the books and the pictures on the wall. And smell the smells.

History would be a revelation of the future as much as it was a study of the past.

How history negotiates its terms and collects its dues from those who break its laws.

Certainly no beast has essayed the boundless, infinitely inventive art of human hatred. No beast can match its range and power.

Enemies can't break your spirit, only friends can.

Who can know from the word goodbye what kind of parting is in store for us.

Even in the most uneventful of our lives, we are called upon to choose our battles...

From now on it is not dying we must fear, but living.

In a determined reversal of her inherent nature, Kochu Maria now, as a policy, hardly ever believed anything that anybody said.

Only that once again they broke the Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much.

There are things that can be forgotten. And things that cannot - that sit on dusty shelves like stuffed birds with baleful, sideways staring eyes.

She was perhaps too young to realize that what she assumed was her love for [him] was actually a tentative, timorous, acceptance of herself.

Sitting next to Tilo, breathing next to her, he felt like an empty house whose locked windows and doors were creaking open a little, to air the ghosts trapped inside it.

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...

[Internationa] Aid is just another praetorian business enterprise.

Cow, goat, chicken, lamb . . . only slaves eat like this, ’ Musa said, heaping an impolite amount on to his plate. ‘Our stomachs are graveyards.

They only asked for punishments that fitted their crimes. Not ones that came like cupboards with built-in bedrooms. Not ones you spent your whole life in, wandering through its maze of shelves.

Socrates asked the key question: why should we be moral?

The story flared, then faded.

Do we need weapons to fight wars? Or do we need wars to create markets for weapons?

Capitalism is destroying the planet. The two old tricks that dug it out of past crises--War and Shopping--simply will not work.

The frozen flowers never go away. They hang around somewhere all the time. I think we need to talk about vases.Did you hear the sound of the white flower?

Ammu's tears made everything that had so far seemed unreal, real.

And once again, only the Small Things were said. The Big Things lurked unsaid inside.

I think one of the saddest things that's happening to literature is that it's getting over-simplified by this diet of simple political ideas.

I have nothing against romance. I believe that we must hold on to the right to dream and to be romantic. But an Indian village is not something that I would romanticize that easily.

Everyone thinks I live alone, but I don't. My characters all live with me.