Top 100 Arundhati Roy Quotes
#1. The trouble is that once you see it, you can't unsee it. And once you've seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There's no innocence. Either way, you're accountable.
Arundhati Roy
#2. If he touched her, he couldn't talk to her, if he loved her he couldn't leave, if he spoke he couldn't listen, if he fought he couldn't win.
Arundhati Roy
#3. Railing against the past will not heal us. History has happened. It's over and done with. All we can do is to change its course by encouraging what we love instead of destroying what we don't.
Arundhati Roy
#4. History is really a study of the future, not the past.
Arundhati Roy
#5. Although she missed the singing by the children from the school opposite her apartment, she didn't teach her own pupils to sing 'We Shall Overcome' in any language, because she wasn't sure that Overcoming was anywhere on anyone's horizon.
Arundhati Roy
#6. The nights are clear but suffused with sloth and sullen expectation.
Arundhati Roy
#7. The genocide will not necessarily take the form of war, or death camps. Most likely it will take the form of ecocide, in which landscapes are devastated and the populations that live there slowly starve or turn upon each other savagely because there isn't enough food or water to go around.
Arundhati Roy
#8. 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.
Arundhati Roy
#9. In a way, writing is an incredible act of individualism, producing your language, and yet to use it from the heart of a crowd as opposed to as an individual performance is a conflicting thing. I do stand alone, and yet it's not about being an individual or being ambitious.
Arundhati Roy
#11. We need a new kind of politics. Not the politics of governance, but the politics of resistance. The politics of opposition. The politics of joining hands across the world and preventing certain destruction.
Arundhati Roy
#12. crashing through the world like a falling stone. It is his color and his light. It is the vessel into which he pours
Arundhati Roy
#14. Globalization means standardization. The very rich and the very poor must want the same things, but only the rich can have them.
Arundhati Roy
#15. Do we need weapons to fight wars? Or do we need wars to create markets for weapons?
Arundhati Roy
#16. Our lungs are gradually being depleted of oxygen. Perhaps it's time to use whatever breath remains in our bodies to say: Open the bloody gates.
Arundhati Roy
#17. For the first time in her life, Tilo felt that her body had enough room to accomodate all of its organs.
Arundhati Roy
#18. Sometimes I think the world is divided into those who have a comfortable relationship with power and those who have a naturally adversarial relationship with power.
Arundhati Roy
#19. Fiction is truth. I think fiction is the truest thing there ever was. My whole effort is to remove that distinction. The writer is the midwife of understanding. It's very important for me to tell politics like a story, to make it real.
Arundhati Roy
#20. Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear - civilization's fear of nature, men's fear of women, power's fear of powerlessness.
Man's subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify.
Men's Needs.
Arundhati Roy
#21. All my books are accidental books - they come from reacting to things and thinking about things and engaging in a real way. They are not about, 'Oh, did it get a good review in the Guardian?' I don't care.
Arundhati Roy
#22. As a writer, I have to go to a different place now. As a person ... I want to step off whatever this stage is that I have been given. The argument has been made, the battle remains to be fought - and that requires a different set of skills.
Arundhati Roy
#23. the connection between GDP growth and jobs is a myth.
Arundhati Roy
#25. Pity the nation that has to silence its writers for speaking their minds.
Arundhati Roy
#26. When I decided to write 'The God of Small Things', I had been working in cinema. It was almost a decision to downshift from there. I thought that 300 people would read it. But it created a platform of trust.
Arundhati Roy
#27. The crisis of modern democracy is a profound one. Free elections, a free press and an independent judiciary mean little when the free market has reduced them to commodities available on sale to the highest bidder.
Arundhati Roy
#28. Torture has been privatized now, so you have obviously the whole scandal in America about the abuse of prisoners and the fact that, army people might be made to pay a price, but who are the privatized torturers accountable too?
Arundhati Roy
#29. Now they were old.
Old enough.
A viable, die-able age.
Arundhati Roy
#30. In California, there are huge problems because of dams. I'm against big dams, per se, because I think that they are economically unfeasible. They're ecologically unsustainable. And they're hugely undemocratic.
Arundhati Roy
#31. She woke to the sound of his heart knocking against his chest. As though it was searching for a way out.
Arundhati Roy
#32. Sleep came to them, quick and easy, like money to millionaires.
Arundhati Roy
#33. It was a time when the unthinkable became the thinkable and the impossible really happened
Arundhati Roy
#35. I kind of resent the idea that the whole world has to be interested in the American elections.
Arundhati Roy
#36. Making bombs will only destroy us. It doesn't matter whether we use them or not. They will destroy us either way.
Arundhati Roy
#38. Non-violence is a piece of theatre. You need an audience. What can you do when you have no audience?
Arundhati Roy
#39. Of course, there's an alternative to terrorism: it's called justice.
Arundhati Roy
#40. I'm Popeye the sailor man dum dum I live in a cara-van dum dum I op-en the door And fall-on the floor I'm Popeye the sailor man dum dum
Arundhati Roy
#41. (1) Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes. (2) Wild geese that flew with the moon on their wings. (3) Bright copper kettles. (4) Doorbells and sleighbells and schnitzel with noodles.
Arundhati Roy
#42. A fee clarified things. Disjuncted sex from love. Needs from feelings.
Arundhati Roy
#43. Humbling was a nice word, Rahel thought. Humbling along without a care in the world
Arundhati Roy
#44. There are things that can be forgotten. And things that cannot - that sit on dusty shelves like stuffed birds with baleful, sideways staring eyes.
Arundhati Roy
#45. She was perhaps too young to realize that what she assumed was her love for [him] was actually a tentative, timorous, acceptance of herself.
Arundhati Roy
#46. It's odd how those who dismiss the peace movement as Utopian proffer the most absurdly dreamy reasons for war.
Arundhati Roy
#47. Somewhere along the way, Capitalism reduced the idea of justice to mean just "human rights," and the idea of dreaming of equality became blasphemous. We are not fighting to tinker with reforming a system that needs to be replaced.
Arundhati Roy
#48. The mullahs of the Islamic world and the mullahs of the Hindu world and the mullahs of the Christian world are all on the same side. And we are against them all.
Arundhati Roy
#49. Who can know from the word goodbye what kind of parting is in store for us.
Arundhati Roy
#50. Of the four things that were Possible in Human Nature, Rahel thought that Infinnate Joy sounded the saddest.
Arundhati Roy
#51. Power is fortified not just by what it destroys, but also by what it creates. Not just by what it takes, but also by what it gives. And powerlessness reaffirmed not just by the helplessness of those who have lost, but also by the gratitude of those who have (or THINK they have) gained.
Arundhati Roy
#52. Her collarbones like wings that spread from the base of her throat to the ends of her shoulders. A bird held down by skin
Arundhati Roy
#53. I could have lived anywhere in the world now if I wanted to.
Arundhati Roy
#54. Debating Imperialism is a bit like debating the pros and cons of rape. What can we say? That we really miss it?
Arundhati Roy
#55. To stay quiet is as political an act as speaking out.
Arundhati Roy
#56. It could be argued that it began long before Christianity arrived in a boat and seeped into Kerala like tea from a teabag.
Arundhati Roy
#57. Poverty is a crime and the poor are terrorists
Arundhati Roy
#58. The American people ought to know that it is not them, but their government's policies, that are so hated.
Arundhati Roy
#59. But eventually, the Elixir of the Soul that had survived wars and the bloody birth of three new countries, was, like most things in the world, trumped by Coca-Cola.
Arundhati Roy
#60. It was raining when Rahel came back to Ayemenem. Slanting silver ropes slammed into loose earth, ploughing it up like gun-fire.
Arundhati Roy
#61. human beings were creatures of habit, and it was amazing the kind of things they could get used to. You
Arundhati Roy
#62. A few months later Miss Mitten was killed by a milk van in Hobart, across the road from a cricket oval. To the twins there was hidden justice in the fact that the milk van had been reversing.
Arundhati Roy
#63. He walked on water. Perhaps. But could he have *swum* on land? In matching knickers and dark glasses? With his Fountain in a Love-in-Tokyo? In pointy shoes and a puff? Would he have had the imagination?
Arundhati Roy
#64. Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she came from poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace Worse Things kept happening
Arundhati Roy
#65. Coercing a woman out of a burka is as bad as coercing her into one. It's not about the burka. It's about the coercion.
Arundhati Roy
#66. It is true that success is the most boring thing, it is tinny and brittle, failure runs deeper. Success is dangerous. I have a very complicated relationship with that word.
Arundhati Roy
#68. She viewed ethnic cleansing, famine and genocide as direct threats to her furniture.
Arundhati Roy
#69. Neither question nor answer was meant as anything more than a polite preamble to conversation.
Arundhati Roy
#70. He gathered her into the cave of his body. (Roy,338)
Arundhati Roy
#71. I'm not ambitious. I don't want to get anywhere, I don't want anything more. I sometimes think that for me that is the real freedom, that I don't want anything. I don't want money or prizes. I want people to know that a war is going to be fought.
Arundhati Roy
#72. That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.
Arundhati Roy
#73. I do what I do, and write what I write, without calculating what is worth what and so on. Fortunately, I am not a banker or an accountant. I feel that there is a time when a political statement needs to be made and I make it.
Arundhati Roy
#74. The war against terror is not really about terror. It's about a superpower's self-destructive impulse toward supremacy, stranglehold, global hemegony.
Arundhati Roy
#75. She wondered how to un-know certain things, certain specific things that she knew but did not wish to know
Arundhati Roy
#76. Reverend Ipe realized that his daughter had by now developed a "reputation" and was unlikely to find a husband. He decided that since she couldn't have a husband there was no harm in her having an education.
Arundhati Roy
#77. Growth, 60 percent of India's workforce is self-employed, and 90 percent of India's labor force works in the unorganized sector.11
Arundhati Roy
#78. Some days he walked along the banks of the river that smelled of shit and pesticides bought with World Bank loans.
Arundhati Roy
#79. With the certitude of a true believer, Vellya Paapen had assured the twins that there was no such thing in the world as a black cat. He said that there were only black cat chaped holes in the universe.
Arundhati Roy
#80. Ammu watched over them fiercely. Her watchfulness stretched her, made her taut and tense. She was quick to reprimand her children, but even quicker to take offense on their behalf.
Arundhati Roy
#81. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.
Arundhati Roy
#82. The strange thing about Roman soldiers in the comics was the amount of trouble they took over their armor and their helmets, and then, after all that, they left their legs bare. It didn't make any sense at all. Weatherwise or otherwise.
Arundhati Roy
#83. Our dreams have been doctored.We belong no where. We sail unanchored on troubled seas.We may never be allowed ashore. Our sorrows will never be sad enough. Our joys never happy enough. Our dreams never big enough. Our lives never important enough. To matter..
Arundhati Roy
#84. At a time when opportunism is everything, when hope seems lost, when everything boils down to a cynical business deal, we must find the courage to dream. To reclaim romance. The romance of believing in justice, in freedom, and in dignity. For everybody.
Arundhati Roy
#85. They looked cheerful in the photograph, Lenin and his wife. As though they had a new refrigerator in their drawing room, and a down payment on a DDA flat.
Arundhati Roy
#86. [Internationa] Aid is just another praetorian business enterprise.
Arundhati Roy
#87. Suddenly Ammu hoped that it had been him that Rahel saw him in the march. She hoped it had been him that raised his flag and knotted arm in anger. She hoped that under his careful cloak of cheerfulness he housed a living breathing anger against the smug, ordered world that she raged against.
Arundhati Roy
#88. His gratitude widened his smile and bent his back.
Arundhati Roy
#89. Is globalization about 'the eradication of world poverty,' or is it a mutant variety of colonialism, remote controlled and digitally operated?
Arundhati Roy
#90. On Rahel's heart Pappachi's moth snapped open its somber wings. Out. In. And lifted its legs. Up. Down.
Arundhati Roy
#92. Nietzsche believed that if Pity were to become the core of ethics, misery would become contagious and happiness an object of suspicion
Arundhati Roy
#93. They're mostly rich folk who live in our poor country like captive animals, incarcerated by their own wealth, locked and barred in their gilded cages, protecting themselves from the threat of the vulgar and unruly multitudes whom they have systematically dispossessed over the centuries.
Arundhati Roy
#94. Although you know that one day you will die, you live as if you won't.
Arundhati Roy
#95. Rahel never wrote to him. There are things that you can't do - like writing letters to a part of yourself.
Arundhati Roy
#96. When you recreate the image of man, why repeat God's mistakes?
Arundhati Roy
#97. The amassing of unfettered wealth of individuals and corporations should stop. The inheritance of rich people's wealth by their children should stop. The expropriators should have their wealth expropriated and redistributed.
Arundhati Roy
#98. 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.
Arundhati Roy
#99. 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 ...
Arundhati Roy
#100. [Are we] far more comfortable with the idea of poor people killing themselves in despair than with the idea of them fighting back?
Arundhati Roy
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