Arundhati Quotes & Sayings

The Occupy movement found places where people who were feeling that anger could come and share it - and that is, as we all know, extremely important in any political movement. The Occupy sites became a way you could gauge the levels of anger and discontent. — Arundhati Roy

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

Anyway, now she thinks of Estha and Rahel as Them, because, separately, the two of them are no longer what They were or ever thought They would be.
Ever.
Their lives have a size and a shape now. Estha has his and Rahel hers.
Edges, Borders, Boundaries, Brinks and Limits have appeared like a team of trolls on their separate horizons. Short creatures with long shadows, patrolling the Blurry End. Gentle half-moons have gathered under their eyes and they are as old as Ammu was when she died. — Arundhati Roy

What came for them? Not death. Just the end of living. — Arundhati Roy

Soviet-style communism failed, not because it was intrinsically evil, but because it was flawed. It allowed too few people to usurp too much power. Twenty-first century market capitalism, American-style, will fail for the same reasons. Both are edifices constructed by human intelligence, undone by human nature. — Arundhati Roy

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

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

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

The trouble is that once America goes off to war, it can't very well return without having fought one. If it doesn't find its enemy, for the sake of the enraged folks back home, it will have to manufacture one. Once war begins, it will develop a momentum, a logic and a justification of its own, and we'll lose sight of why it's being fought in the first place. — Arundhati Roy

When you live in the United States, with the roar of the free market, the roar of this huge military power, the roar of being at the heart of empire, it's hard to hear the whispering of the rest of the world. And I think many US citizens want to. I don't think that all of them necessarily are co-conspirators in this concept of empire. And those who are not, need to listen to other stories in the world - other voices, other people. — Arundhati Roy

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

an Urdu couplet by one of his favorite poets, Mir Taqi Mir: Jis sar ko ghurur aaj hai yaan taj-vari ka Kal uss pe yahin shor hai phir nauhagari ka The head which today proudly flaunts a crown Will tomorrow, right here, in lamentation drown — Arundhati Roy

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

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. — Arundhati Roy

I see a role for specialized knowledge, but I think that it's important for there to be an arena where it is shared, where it is communicated. It's not that somebody shouldn't have specialized knowledge. The ability to dig a trench and lay a cable is a kind of specialized knowledge. Farmers have specialized knowledge, too. The question is: what sort of knowledge is privileged in our societies? I don't think that a CEO is more valuable to society and ought to be paid ten million dollars a year, while farmers and laborers starve.
The range of what is valued has become so extreme that one lot of people have captured it and left three-quarters of the world to live in unthinkable poverty, because their work is not valued. What would happen if the sweepers of the city went on strike or the sewage system didn't work? A CEO wouldn't be able to deal with his own shit. — Arundhati Roy

She thought of Chacko's laugh, and a smile stayed in her eyes for a long time. — Arundhati Roy

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

She wondered how to un-know certain things, certain specific things that she knew but did not wish to know — Arundhati Roy

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

Baby Kochamma had installed a dish antenna on the roof of the Ayemenem house. She presided over the world in her drawing room on satellite TV. The impossible excitement that this engendered in Baby Kochamma wasn't hard to understand. It wasn't something that happened gradually. It happened overnight. Blondes, wars, famines, football, sex, music, coups d'etat - they all arrived on the same train. They unpacked together. They stayed at the same hotel. And in Ayemenem, where once the loudest sound had been a musical bus horn, now whole wars, famines, picturesque massacres and Bill Clinton could be summoned up like servants. — Arundhati Roy

People say to me, Oh, it's so wonderful that you're writing about real things, and that it's a political thing to do, and I say, look-to be in my position and not say anything is a hell of a political thing. You need to think politically, otherwise you'll be one of these people who says, Oh, this person's saying this and that person's saying that, and I'm confused. And I say, yeah, because you want to be confused. — Arundhati Roy

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

I really worry about these political people that have no personal life. If there's nothing that's lovely, and if there's nothing that's just ephemeral, that you can just lie on the floor and bust a gut laughing at, then what's the point? — Arundhati Roy

Every strategy for real social change - land reform, education, public health, the equitable distribution of natural resources ... - has been cleverly, cunningly, and consistently scuttled and rendered ineffectual by those castes and that class of people which has a stranglehold on the political process. — Arundhati Roy

Et tu, Caesar? Then fall, Caesar.
Et tu, Estha? Then fall, Estha. — Arundhati Roy

The way her body existed only where he touched her. The rest of her was smoke. — Arundhati Roy

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

After using the 'good offices' of UN diplomacy (economic sanctions and weapons inspections) to ensure that Iraq was brought to its knees, its people starved, half a million of its children killed, its infrastructure severely damaged, after making sure that most of its weapons have been destroyed, in an act of cowardice that must surely be unrivalled in history, the 'Allies' / 'Coalition of the Willing' (better known as the Coalition of the Bullied and Bought) - sent in an invading army! — Arundhati Roy

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. — Arundhati Roy

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

In Orissa, where it is mining bauxite, Vedanta is financing a university. In these creeping, innocuous ways mining corporations enter our imaginations: the Gentle Giants Who Really Care. It's called CSR, corporate social responsibility. — Arundhati Roy

A fee clarified things. Disjuncted sex from love. Needs from feelings. — Arundhati Roy

The English-language press in India supports the project of corporate globalization fully. It has no time for dispossession and drought and farmers' debts, the ravages that the corporate globalization project is wreaking on the poor of India. So to suddenly turn around and condemn the riots is a typical middle-class response. Let's support everything that leads to the conditions in which the massacre takes place, but when the killing starts, you recoil in middle-class horror, and say, Oh, that's not very nice. Can't we be more civilized? — Arundhati Roy

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

If you're happy in a dream, does that count? — Arundhati Roy

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

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

Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead. When independent-thinking people (and here I do not include the corporate media) begin to rally under flags, when writers, painters, musicians, film makers suspend their judgment and blindly yoke their art to the service of the "Nation," it's time for all of us to sit up and worry. — Arundhati Roy

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

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

The war for the Narmada valley is not just some exotic tribal war, or a remote rural war or even an exclusively Indian war. Its a war for the rivers and the mountains and the forests of the world. All sorts of warriors from all over the world, anyone who wishes to enlist, will be honored and welcomed. Every kind of warrior will be needed. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, judges, journalists, students, sportsmen, painters, actors, singers, lovers ... The borders are open, folks! Come on in. — Arundhati Roy

I am a woman who is a granddaughter of a lady who used to be beaten on the head by her husband, of a mother who went through hell because she was divorced and had to bring up these kids. And I can take 10 men out to lunch and pay the bill, and nobody even thinks twice about it. So don't mess with me. — Arundhati Roy

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

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

Although you know that one day you will die, you live as if you won't. — Arundhati Roy

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

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

Red ants that had a sour farty smell when they were squashed. — Arundhati Roy

[Internationa] Aid is just another praetorian business enterprise. — Arundhati Roy

Democracy is the Free World's whore, willing to dress up, dress down, willing to satisfy a whole range of tastes. — Arundhati Roy

Of the four things that were Possible in Human Nature, Rahel thought that Infinnate Joy sounded the saddest. — Arundhati Roy

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

To annihilate indigenous populations eventually paves the way to our own annihilation. They are the only people who practice sustainable living. We think they are relics of the past, but they may be the gatekeepers to our future. — Arundhati Roy

It turned out to be a war which, unfortunately for Comrade Pillai, would end almost before it began. Victory was gifted to him wrapped and beribboned, on a silver tray. Only then, when it was too late, and Paradise Pickles slumped softly to the floor without so much as a murmur or even the pretense of resistance, did Comrade Pillai realize that what he really needed was the process of war more than the outcome of victory. War could have been the stallion that he rode, part of, if not all, the way to the Legislative Assembly, whereas victory left him no better off than when he started out.
He broke the eggs but burned the omelette. — Arundhati Roy

Enemies can't break your spirit, only friends can. — Arundhati Roy

The World Trade Organization, The World Bank, The International Monetary Fund and other financial institutions virtually write economic policy and parliamentary legislation. With a deadly combination of arrogance and ruthlessness, they take their sledgehammers to fragile, interdependent, historically complex societies and devastate them, all under the fluttering banner of 'reform'. — Arundhati Roy

The era of manufacturing consent has given way to the era of manufacturing news. Soon media newsrooms will drop the pretence, and start hiring theatre directors instead of journalists. — Arundhati Roy

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

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

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

It's being made out that the whole point of the war was to topple the Taliban regime and liberate Afghan women from their burqas, we are being asked to believe that the U.S. marines are actually on a feminist mission. — Arundhati Roy

I have truly known what it means for a writer to feel loved. — Arundhati Roy

The first step towards reimagining a world gone terribly wrong would be to stop the annihilation of those who have a different imagination- an imagination that is outside of capitalism as well as communism. An imagination which has an altogether different understanding of what constitutes happiness and fulfilment. To gain this philosophical space, it is necessary to concede some physical space for survival of those who may look like the keepers of our past but who may really be the guides to our future. To do this we have to ask our rulers: Can you leave the water in the rivers, the trees in the forest? Can you leave the bauxite in the mountain? — Arundhati Roy

Her grief grieved her. His devastated her. — Arundhati Roy

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. — Arundhati Roy

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

It is such a supreme folly to believe that nuclear weapons are deadly only if they're used. The fact that they exist at all, their presence in our lives, will wreak more havoc than we can begin to fathom. Nuclear weapons pervade our thinking. Control our behavior. Administer our societies. Inform our dreams. They bury themselves like meat hooks deep in the base of our brains. They are purveyors of madness. They are the ultimate colonizer. Whiter than any white man that ever lived. The very heart of whiteness. — Arundhati Roy

Baby Kochamma grudged them their moments of high happiness when a dragonfly they'd caught lifted a small stone off their palms with its legs, or when they had permission to bathe the pigs, or they found an egg hot form a hen. But most of all, she grudged them the comfort they drew from each other. She expected from them some token unhappiness. At the very least. — Arundhati Roy

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

Pity the nation that has to silence its writers for speaking their minds. — Arundhati Roy

When the twins asked what cuff-links were for - "To link cuffs together," Ammu told them - they were thrilled by this morsel of logic in what had so far seemed an illogical language. Cuff+link = cuff-link. This, to them, rivaled the precision of logic and mathematics. Cuff-links gave them an inordinate (if exaggerated) satisfaction, and a real affection for the English language. — Arundhati Roy

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

I think the kind of landscape that you grew up in, it lives with you. I don't think it's true of people who've grown up in cities so much; you may love a building, but I don't think that you can love it in the way that you love a tree or a river or the colour of the earth; it's a different kind of love. — Arundhati Roy

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

On bad days the orange walls held hands and bent over him, inspecting him, like malevolent doctors, slowly, deliberately, squeezing the breath out of him and making him scream. Sometimes they receded of their own accord, and the room he lay in grew impossibly large, terrorizing him with the specter of his own insignificance. That too made him cry out. — Arundhati Roy

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

What was it that gave Ammu this Unsafe Edge? This air of unpredictability? It was what she had battling inside her. An unmixable mix. The infinite tenderness of motherhood and the reckless rage of a suicide bomber. — Arundhati Roy

human beings were creatures of habit, and it was amazing the kind of things they could get used to. You — Arundhati Roy

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

Being with him made her feel as though her soul had escaped from the narrow confines of her island country into the vast, extravagant spaces of his. He made her feel as though the world belonged to them- as though it lay before them like an opened frog on a dissecting table, begging to be examined. — Arundhati Roy

People always loved best what they identified most with. — Arundhati Roy

In an old war, everybody has an ax to grind. — Arundhati Roy

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

It helps to remember that nobody likes to be managed. But everybody longs to be included. — Arundhati Subramaniam

Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things. — Arundhati Roy

The steep tiled roof had grown dark and mossy with age and rain. The triangular wooden frames fitted into the gables were intricately carved, the light that slanted through them and fell in patterns on the floor was full of secrets. Wolves. Flowers. Iguanas. Changing shape as the sun moved through the sky. Dying punctually at Dusk. — Arundhati Roy

His eyes were polite yet maleficent, as though he was making an effort to be civil to the photographer while plotting to murder his wife. — Arundhati Roy

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

The policies the US government is following are dangerous for its citizens. It's true that you can bomb or buy out anybody that you want to, but you can't control the rage that's building in the world. You just can't. And that rage will express itself in some way or the other. Condemning violence when a section of your economy is based on selling weapons and making bombs and piling up chemical and biological weapons? When the soul of your culture worships violence? On what grounds are you going to condemn terrorism, unless you change your attitude toward violence? — Arundhati Roy

The steel door of the incinerator went up and the muted hum of the eternal fire became a red roaring. The heat lunged out at them like a famished beast. Then Rahel's Ammu was fed to it. Her hair, her skin, her smile. Her voice. They way she used Kipling to love her children before putting them to bed: We be of one blood, though and I. Her goodnight kiss. The way she held their faces steady with one hand (squashed-cheeked, fish-mouthed) while she parted and combed their hair with the other. The way she held knickers out for Rahel to climb into. Left leg, right leg. All this was fed to the beast, and it was satisfied.
She was their Ammu and their Baba and she had loved them Double. — Arundhati Roy

For the first time in her life, Tilo felt that her body had enough room to accomodate all of its organs. — Arundhati Roy

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

Do you think that the people of South Africa, or anywhere on the continent of Africa, or India, or Pakistan are longing to be kicked around all over again? — Arundhati Roy

Fascism itself can only be turned away if all those who are outraged by it show a commitment to social justice that equals the intensity of their indignation. — Arundhati Roy

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

Not everybody likes the idea of their cities filling up with the poor. A judge in Bombay called slum dwellers pickpockets of urban land. Another said, while ordering the bulldozing of unauthorized colonies, that people who couldn't afford to live in cities shouldn't live in them. When those who had been evicted went back to where they came from, they found their villages had disappeared under great dams and dusty quarries. — Arundhati Roy

You begin to realize that hypocrisy is not a terrible thing when you see what overt fascism is compared to sort of covert, you know, communal politics which the Congress has never been shy of indulging in. — Arundhati Roy

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

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

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