Top 100 Arundhati Quotes
#1. Pity the nation that has to silence its writers for speaking their minds.
Arundhati Roy
#2. Now they were old.
Old enough.
A viable, die-able age.
Arundhati Roy
#3. Fiction is too beautiful to be about just one thing. It should be about everything.
Arundhati Roy
#4. My writing is translated into every Indian language, it's distributed in pamphlets, in little private video things, it's everywhere. So it's a lovely pastime for the middle class to think of itself as the whole nation.
Arundhati Roy
#5. 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
#6. How carelessly imperial power vivisected ancient civilizations. Palestine and Kashmir are imperial Britain's festering,
blood-drenched gifts to the modem world. Both are fault lines in the raging international conicts of today.
Arundhati Roy
#7. 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
#8. The foreign newspapers had dumped the old exotics in favor of the younger generation. The exotics didn't suit the image of the New India - a nuclear power and an emerging destination for international finance. Ustad
Arundhati Roy
#9. It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain. To let it be, to travel with it, as Velutha did, is much the harder thing to do.
Arundhati Roy
#10. When you say things like, 'We have to wipe out the Taliban,' what does that mean? The Taliban is not a fixed number of people. The Taliban is an ideology that has sprung out of a history that, you know, America created anyway.
Arundhati Roy
#11. It simply did not occur to her that she had hurt him as deeply as she had, because she still thought of herself as an ordinary woman, and him as an extraordinary man.
Arundhati Roy
#12. 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
#13. People who promote the free market and growth are far more romantic, and far more ideologically driven and blinded by their vision than somebody who goes in and comments about the beauty of a forest or the stars in the sky.
Arundhati Roy
#14. 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
#15. It was the kind of time in the life of a family when something happens to nudge its hidden morality from its resting place and make it bubble to the surface and float for a while. In clear view. For everyone to see.
Arundhati Roy
#17. Sometimes there's truth in old cliches. There can be no real peace without justice. And without resistance there will be no justice.
Arundhati Roy
#18. Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.
Arundhati Roy
#19. the connection between GDP growth and jobs is a myth.
Arundhati Roy
#20. 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
#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. 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.
Arundhati Roy
#23. 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
#24. Red ants that had a sour farty smell when they were squashed.
Arundhati Roy
#25. 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
#26. 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.
Arundhati Roy
#27. Of course, there's an alternative to terrorism: it's called justice.
Arundhati Roy
#28. How can you measure progress if you don't know what it costs and who has paid for it? How can the "market" put a price on things - food, clothes, electricity, running water - when it doesn't take into account the REAL cost of production?
Arundhati Roy
#29. Non-violence is a piece of theatre. You need an audience. What can you do when you have no audience?
Arundhati Roy
#30. The only good thing about nuclear war is that it is the single most egalitarian idea that man has ever had. On the day of reckoning, you will not be asked to present your credentials. The devastation will be indiscriminate.
Arundhati Roy
#32. There's really no such thing as the 'voiceless'. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.
Arundhati Roy
#33. Making bombs will only destroy us. It doesn't matter whether we use them or not. They will destroy us either way.
Arundhati Roy
#35. I think people ease into this careerist professionalism, so if you're a writer it's your job to manufacture books as opposed to writing them and to go to festivals and spend your life emotionally invested in reviews or the awards. You have to shrink your universe in a way. To me, it's the opposite.
Arundhati Roy
#36. 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.
Arundhati Roy
#37. Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century. Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's minds and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.
Arundhati Roy
#38. I kind of resent the idea that the whole world has to be interested in the American elections.
Arundhati Roy
#39. 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
#40. There can be nothing more humiliating for a writer of fiction to have to do than restate a case that has already been made.
Arundhati Roy
#41. What came for them? Not death. Just the end of living.
Arundhati Roy
#43. My mother is like a character who escaped from the set of a Fellini film. She's a whole performing universe of her own. Activists would run a mile from her because they could not deal with what she is.
Arundhati Roy
#44. Rahel's toy wristwatch had the time painted on it. Ten to two. One of her ambitions was to own a watch on which she could change the time whenever she wanted to (which according to her was what Time was meant for in the first place).
Arundhati Roy
#45. It was a time when the unthinkable became the thinkable and the impossible really happened
Arundhati Roy
#46. Sleep came to them, quick and easy, like money to millionaires.
Arundhati Roy
#47. Let's leave one alive so that it can be lonely.
Arundhati Roy
#48. Smells, like music, hold memories. She breathed deep, and bottled it up for posterity.
Arundhati Roy
#49. She woke to the sound of his heart knocking against his chest. As though it was searching for a way out.
Arundhati Roy
#50. He folded his fear into a perfect rose. He held it out in the palm of his hand. She took it from him and put it in her hair.
Arundhati Roy
#51. 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.
Arundhati Roy
#52. And on Ammu's road (to Age and Death) a small, sunny meadow appeared. Copper grass spangled with blue butterflies. Beyond it, an abyss.
Arundhati Roy
#53. 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
#54. NGOs have a complicated space in neoliberal politics. They are supposed to mop up the anger. Even when they are doing good work, they are supposed to maintain the status quo. They are the missionaries of the corporate world.
Arundhati Roy
#55. Revolutions can, and often have, begun with reading.
The Doctor and the Saint
Arundhati Roy
#56. As she watched him she understood the quality of his beauty. How his labor had shaped him. How the wood he fashioned had fashioned him. Each plank he planed, each nail he drove, each thing he made molded him. Had left its stamp on him. Had given him his strength, his supple grace.
Arundhati Roy
#57. Have we raised the threshold of horror so high that nothing short of a nuclear strike qualifies as a 'real' war? Are we to spend the rest of our lives in this state of high alert with guns pointed at each other's heads and fingers trembling on the trigger?
Arundhati Roy
#58. 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
#59. The God of Loss.
The God of Small Things.
He left no footprints in the sand, no ripples in water, no image in mirrors.
Arundhati Roy
#60. As a woman who grew up in a village in India, I've spent my whole life fighting tradition. There's no way that I want to be a traditional Indian housewife.
Arundhati Roy
#61. The nights are clear but suffused with sloth and sullen expectation.
Arundhati Roy
#62. It was a grand old house, the Ayemenem House, but aloof-looking. As though it had little to do with the people who lived in it. Like an old man with rheumy eyes watching children play, seeing only transience in their shrill elation and their whole-hearted commitment to life.
Arundhati Roy
#63. Dear Doctor,
If you like you can change every inch of me. I'm just a story.
Arundhati Roy
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. The fact is that America's weapons systems have made it impossible for anybody to confront it militarily. So, all you have is your wits and your cunning, and your ability to fight in the way the Iraqis are fighting.
Arundhati Roy
#67. History is really a study of the future, not the past.
Arundhati Roy
#68. And once again, only the Small Things were said. The Big Things lurked unsaid inside.
Arundhati Roy
#69. The truth is that it's far easier to make a bomb than to educate four hundred million people.
Arundhati Roy
#70. Must we behave like some damn godforsaken tribe that's just been discovered?
Arundhati Roy
#71. 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
#72. For the South African White minority, neo-liberalism is apartheid with a clean conscience, called Democracy.
Arundhati Roy
#73. Perverted quality; Moral perversion; The innate corruption of human nature due to original sin; Both the elect and the non-elect came into the world in a state of total d. and alienation from God, and can, of themselves do nothing but sin. J.H. Blunt.
Arundhati Roy
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. I'm living to the edges of my fingernails, using everything I have. It's impossible for me to look at things politically or in any way as a project, to further my career. You're injected directly into the blood of the places in which you're living and what's going on there.
Arundhati Roy
#77. For the first time in her life, Tilo felt that her body had enough room to accomodate all of its organs.
Arundhati Roy
#78. I think many people were surprised by the victory of the Congress, because it was really hard to see beyond the sort of haze of hatred that the Hindu nationalists had been spreading.
Arundhati Roy
#79. 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
#80. Do we need weapons to fight wars? Or do we need wars to create markets for weapons?
Arundhati Roy
#81. When she looked at him now, she couldn't help thinking that the man he had become bore so little resemblance to the boy he had been. His smile was the only piece of baggage he had carried with him from boyhood into manhood.
Arundhati Roy
#82. Everybody can't have the life of a normal, average American person in India - they can't. So, it's about egalitarianism. It's about sharing things more equally. It's about access to natural resources.
Arundhati Roy
#83. India does not have a problem of people grabbing share from a fixed pie. India is one of the few nations where the pie is getting bigger.
Arundhati Bhattacharya
#84. Globalization means standardization. The very rich and the very poor must want the same things, but only the rich can have them.
Arundhati Roy
#85. 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.
Arundhati Roy
#86. Indian nationalists and the government seem to believe that they can fortify their idea of a resurgent India with a combination of bullying and Boeing airplanes. But they don't understand the subversive strength of warm boiled eggs.
Arundhati Roy
#88. If you think of the world as a global village, a fight between India and Pakistan is like a fight between the poorest people in the poorest quarters - the Adivasis and the Dalits. And in the meantime, the zamindars are laying the oil pipelines and selling both parties weapons.
Arundhati Roy
#89. Rahel thought of the someone who had taken the trouble to go up there with cans of paint, white for the clouds, blue for the sky, silver for the jets, and brushes, and thinner.
Arundhati Roy
#90. In the next room Baby Kochamma heard the noise and came to find out what it was all about. She saw Grief and Trouble ahead, and secretly, in her heart of hearts, she rejoiced.
Arundhati Roy
#91. I am a Maoist sympathiser. I'm not a Maoist ideologue, because the communist movements in history have been just as destructive as capitalism.
Arundhati Roy
#92. If we were to lose the ability to be emotional, if we were to lose the ability to be angry, to be outraged, we would be robots. And I refuse that.
Arundhati Roy
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. they asked the poor what it was like to be poor, the hungry what it was like to be hungry, the homeless what it was like to be homeless.
Arundhati Roy
#96. Privatisation is presented as being the only alternative to an inefficient, corrupt state. In fact, it is not a choice at all ... it is a mutually profitable business contract between the private company (preferably foreign) and the ruling elite of the Third World
Arundhati Roy
#97. The boat that Ammu would use to cross the river. To love by night the man her children loved by day.
Arundhati Roy
#99. When we speak of confronting Empire, we need to identify what Empire means. Does it mean the US government (and its European satellites), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation (WTO), and multinational corporations? Or is it something more than that?
Arundhati Roy
#100. 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.
Arundhati Roy
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