Arundhati Quotes

The gist of it was the caste (privileged) hindus wanted the power to close the door on untouchables, but on no account could untouchables be given the power to close the door on themselves. The Masters knew that Choice was Power. ~ Arundhati Roy

If protesting against having a nuclear bomb implanted in my brain is anti-Hindu and anti-national, then I secede. I hereby declare myself an independent, mobile republic. I am a citizen of the earth. I own no territory. I have no flag. My policies are simple. I'm willing to sign any nuclear non-proliferation treaty or nuclear test ban treaty that's going. Immigrants are welcome. You can help me design our flag. ~ Arundhati Roy

There's really no such thing as the 'voiceless'. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard. ~ Arundhati Roy

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

The invasion of Iraq will surely go down in history as one of the most cowardly wars ever fought. It was a war in which a band of rich nations, armed with enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world several times over, rounded on a poor nation, falsely accused it of having nuclear weapons, used the United Nations to force it to disarm, then invaded it, occupied it, and are now in the process of selling it. ~ Arundhati Roy

Insanity hovered close at hand, like an eager waiter at an expensive restaurant. ~ Arundhati Roy

They sensed somehow that she lived in the prenumbral shadows between two worlds, just beyond the grasp of their power. That a woman that they had already damned, now had little left to lose, and could therefore be dangerous. So on the days that the radio played Ammu's songs, people avoided her, making little loops around her, because everybody agreed that it was best to just Let Her Be. ~ Arundhati Roy

Ammu quickly learned to recognize and despise the ugly face of sympathy. They ... gloated. She fought off the urge to slap them. ~ Arundhati Roy

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

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

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

There was nothing accidental about what happened that morning. Nothing incidental. It was no stray mugging or personal settling of scores. This was an era imprinting itself on those who lived in it.

History in live performance.

If they hurt Velutha more than they intended to, it was only because any kinship, any connection between themselves and him, any implication that if nothing else, at least biologically he was a fellow creature--had been severed long ago. They were not arresting a man, they were exorcising fear. They had no instrument to calibrate how much punishment he could take. No means of gauging how much or how permanently they had damaged him.

Unlike the custom of rampaging religious mobs or conquering armies running riot, that morning in the Heart of Darkness the posse of Touchable Policemen acted with economy, not frenzy. Efficiency, not anarchy. Responsibility, not hysteria. They didn't tear out his hair or burn him alive. They didn't hack off his genitals and stuff them in his mouth. They didn't rape him. Or behead him.

After all they were not battling an epidemic. They were merely inoculating a community against an outbreak. ~ Arundhati Roy

Humans are animals of habit. ~ Arundhati Roy

Debating Imperialism is a bit like debating the pros and cons of rape. What can we say? That we really miss it? ~ Arundhati Roy

Nietzsche believed that if Pity were to become the core of ethics, misery would become contagious and happiness an object of suspicion ~ Arundhati Roy

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

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

See, ma'am, frankly speaking this problem can't be solved by us police or military. The problem with these tribals is they don't understand greed. Unless they become greedy there's no hope for us. I have told my boss, remove the force and instead put a TV in every home. Everything will be automatically sorted out. ~ Arundhati Roy

But for now, it even has a Gandhian approach to sabotage; before a police vehicle is burnt for example, it is stripped down and every part is cannibalized. The steering wheel is straightened out and made into a bharmaar barrel, the rexine upholstery stripped and used for ammunition pouches, the battery for solar charging. Should I write a play I wonder- Gandhi Get Your Gun. Or will I be lynched? ~ Arundhati Roy

It was not entirely his fault that he lived in a society where a man's death could be more profitable than his life had ever been. ~ Arundhati Roy

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

I am an artist and a writer, and I do think that one always places oneself in the picture to see where one fits. ~ 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

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

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

That a woman that they had already damned, now had little left to lose, and could therefore be dangerous. ~ Arundhati Roy

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

Questions signified a vulgar display of ignorance. ~ Arundhati Roy

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

To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget. ~ Arundhati Roy

A sparrow lay dead on the backseat. She had found her way through a hole in the windscreen, tempted by some seat-sponge for her nest. She never found her way out. No one noticed her panicked car-window appeals. She died on the backseat, with her legs in the air. Like a joke. ~ Arundhati Roy

Anything's possible in Human Nature," Chacko said in his Reading Aloud voice. Talking to the darkness now, suddenly insensitive to his little fountain-haired niece. "Love. Madness. Hope. Infinite joy."
Of the four things that were Possible in Human Nature, Rahel thought that Infinnate Joy sounded the saddest. Perhaps because of the way Chacko said it.
Infinnate Joy. With a church sound to it. Like a sad fish with fins all over. ~ Arundhati Roy

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

I think it is dangerous to confuse the idea of democracy with elections. Just because you have elections doesn't mean you're a democratic country. They're a very vitally important part of a democracy. But there are other things that ought to function as checks and balances. If elections are the only thing that matter, then people are going to resort to anything to win that election. ~ Arundhati Roy

There are people who have comfortable relationships with power and people with natural antagonism to power. I think it's easy to guess where I am in that. ~ Arundhati Roy

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. Thirty-one.
Not old.
Not young.
But a viable die-able age. ~ Arundhati Roy

Now they were old.
Old enough.
A viable, die-able age. ~ Arundhati Roy

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. ~ Arundhati Roy

We're told, often enough, that as a species we are poised on the edge of the abyss. It's possible that our puffed-up, prideful intelligence has outstripped our instinct for survival and the road back to safety has already been washed away. In which case there's nothing much to be done. If there is something to be done, then one thing is for sure: those who created the problem will not be the ones who come up with a solution. ~ Arundhati Roy

The two men had a conversation. Brief, cryptic, to the point. As though they had exchanged numbers and not words. No explanations seemed necessary. They were not friends, Comrade Pillai and Inspector Thomas Mathew, and they didn't trust each other. But they understood each other perfectly. They were both men whom childhood had abandoned without a trace. Men without curiosity. Without doubt. Both in their own way truly, terrifyingly adult. They looked out at the world and never wondered how it worked, because they knew. They worked it. They were mechanics who serviced different parts of the machine. ~ Arundhati Roy

Wars are never fought for altruistic reasons. ~ 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

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

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

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

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

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

In effect, terrorists now have the power to ignite war. They almost have their finger on the nuclear button. They almost have the status of heads of state. And that has enhanced the effectiveness and romance of terrorism.
The US government's response to September 11 has actually privileged terrorism. It has given it a huge impetus, and made it look like terrorism is the only effective way to be heard. Over the years, every kind of nonviolent resistance movement has been crushed, ignored, kicked aside. But if you're a terrorist, you have a great chance of being negotiated with, of being on TV, of getting all the attention you couldn't have dreamt of earlier. ~ Arundhati Roy

I could have lived anywhere in the world now if I wanted to. ~ Arundhati Roy

Though the rain washed Mammachi's spit off his face, it didn't stop the feeling that somebody had lifted off his head and vomited into his body. Lumpy vomit dribbling down his insides. Over his heart. His lungs. The slow thick drip into the pit of his stomach. All his organs awash in vomit. There was nothing the rain could do about that. ~ 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 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

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

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

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

India lives in several centuries at the same time. Every night outside my house I pass a road gang of emaciated laborers digging a trench to lay fiber optic cables to speed up digital revolution. They work by the light of a few candles. ~ Arundhati Roy

Making bombs will only destroy us. It doesn't matter whether we use them or not. They will destroy us either way. ~ Arundhati Roy

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

The traffic inside her head seemed to have stopped believing in traffic lights. The result was incessant noise, a few bad crashes and eventually gridlock. ~ 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

She could hear her hair growing. It sounded like something crumbling. A burnt thing crumbling. Coal. Toast. Moths crisped on a light bulb. She remembered reading somewhere that even after people died, their hair and nails kept growing. Like starlight, travelling through the universe long after the stars themselves had died. Like cities. Fizzy, effervescent, simulating the illusion of life while the planet they had plundered died around them. ~ Arundhati Roy

The American people ought to know that it is not them, but their government's policies, that are so hated. ~ Arundhati Roy

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

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

Jungle post arrives. Two biscuits for me. A poem and a pressed flower from Comrade Narmada. A lovely letter from Maase. (Who is she? Will I ever know?) Comrade ~ Arundhati Roy

To the Kathakali Man these stories are his children and his childhood. He has grown up within them. They are the house he was raised in, the meadows he played in. They are his windows and his way of seeing. So when he tells a story, he handles it as he would a child of his own. He teases it. He punishes it. He sends it up like a bubble. He wrestles it to the ground and lets it go again. He laughs at it because he loves it. He can fly you across whole worlds in minutes, he can stop for hours to examine a wilting leaf. Or play with a sleeping monkey's tail. He can turn effortlessly from the carnage of war into the felicity of a woman washing her hair in a mountain stream. From the crafty ebullience of a rakshasa with a new idea into a gossipy Malayali with a scandal to spread. From the sensuousness of a woman with a baby at her breast into the seductive mischief of Krishna's smile. He can reveal the nugget of sorrow that happiness contains. The hidden fish of shame in a sea of glory. ~ 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

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

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

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. ~ Arundhati Roy

The time has come, the Walrus said. Perhaps things will become worse and then better. Perhaps there's a small god
up in heaven readying herself for us. Another world is not only possible, she's on her way. Maybe many of us won't
be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing. ~ Arundhati Roy

Growing religious fundamentalism is directly linked to globalization and to privatization. The Indian government is talking about selling its entire power sector to foreign multinationals, but when the consequences of that become hard to manage, the government immediately starts saying, "Should we build the Ram temple in Ayodhya?" Everyone goes baying off in that direction. Meanwhile, contracts are signed.
It's like a game. That's something we have to understand. It's like a pincer action. With one hand they're selling the country out to multinationals. With the other they're orchestrating this howling cultural nationalism. On the one hand you're saying that the world is a global village. On the other hand governments spend millions and millions patrolling their borders with nuclear weapons. ~ Arundhati Roy

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

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

Corporate executives and businessmen do not. So somebody who wants to invest in a dam or build a steel plant or a buy a bauxite mine is not considered a security hazard, whereas a scholar who might wish to participate in a seminar about, say, displacement or communalism, or rising malnutrition in a globalized economy, is. Foreign terrorists with bad intentions have probably guessed by now that they are better off wearing Prada suits and pretending they want to buy a mine than wearing old corduroys and saying they want to attend a seminar. (Some would argue that mine buyers in Prada suits are the real terrorists.) ~ Arundhati Roy

Pigs are horses. Girls are boys. War is peace. ~ Arundhati Roy

The sky was thick with TV. If you wore special glasses you could see them spinning through the sky among the bats and homing birds - blondes, wars, famines, football, food shows, coups d'état, hairstyles stiff with hair spray. Designer pectorals. Gliding towards Ayemenem like skydivers. Making patterns in the sky. Wheels. Windmills. Flowers blooming and unblooming. ~ Arundhati Roy

The boat that Ammu would use to cross the river. To love by night the man her children loved by day. ~ Arundhati Roy

The Congress has historically played covert communal politics in order to create what in India we call vote banks where you pit one community against another and so on in order to secure votes. ~ Arundhati Roy

May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun. ~ Arundhati Roy

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

One: An end to cross-ownership in businesses. For example: weapons manufacturers cannot own TV stations, mining corporations cannot run newspapers, business houses cannot fund universities, drug companies cannot control public health funds. Two: Natural resources and essential infrastructure - water supply, electricity, health, and education - cannot be privatized. Three: Everybody must have the right to shelter, education, and health care. Four: The children of the rich cannot inherit their parents' wealth. ~ Arundhati Roy

Chacko had been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and was permitted excesses and eccentricities nobody else was. He claimed to be writing a Family Biography that the Family would have to pay him not to publish. Ammu said that there was only one person in the family who was a fit candidate for biographical blackmail and that was Chacko himself. ~ Arundhati Roy

In the years to come they would replay this scene in their heads. As children. As teenagers. As adults. Had they been deceived into doing what they did? Had they been tricked into condemnation?
In a way, yes. But it wasn't as simple as that. They both knew that they had been given a choice. And how quick they had been in the choosing it! They hadn't given it more than a second of thought before they looked up and said (not together, but almost) "Save Ammu." Save us. Save our mother. (302) ~ Arundhati Roy

Need was a warehouse that could accommodate a considerable amount of cruelty. ~ Arundhati Roy

Of course, there's an alternative to terrorism: it's called justice. ~ Arundhati Roy

Once the quietness arrived, it stayed and spread in Estha. It reached out of his head and enfolded him in its swampy arms. It rocked him to the rhythm of an ancient, fetal heartbeat. It sent its stealthy, suckered tentacles inching along the insides of his skull, hoovering the knolls and dells of his memory; dislodging old sentences, whisking them off the tip of his tongue. It stripped his thoughts of the words that described them and left them pared and naked. Unspeakable. Numb. And to an observer therefore, perhaps barely there. Slowly, over the years, Estha withdrew from the world. He grew accustomed to the uneasy octopus that lived inside him and squirted its inky tranquilizer on his past. Gradually the reason for his silence was hidden away, entombed somewhere deep in the soothing folds of the fact of it. ~ 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

Some things come with their own punishments. ~ Arundhati Roy

Colorful demonstrations and weekend marches are vital but alone are not powerful enough to stop wars. Wars will be stopped only when soldiers refuse to fight, when workers refuse to load weapons onto ships and aircraft, when people boycott the economic outposts of Empire that are strung across the globe. ~ Arundhati Roy

Trees raised their naked, mottled branches to the sky like mourners stilled in attitudes of grief. ~ Arundhati Roy

The secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don't deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don't surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover's skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don't. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won't. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn't. And yet you want to know again.
That is their mystery and their magic. ~ 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

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

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

Ridges of muscle on his stomach rose under his skin like divisions on a slab of chocolate. He held her close by the light of an oil lamp, and he shone as though he had been polished with a high-wax body polish. ~ Arundhati Roy

The American way of life is not sustainable. It doesn't acknowledge that there is a world beyond America. ~ Arundhati Roy

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

There's no division on my bookshelf between fiction and nonfiction. As far as I'm concerned, fiction is about the truth. ~ Arundhati Roy

The adivasi people have a long and courageous history of resistance that predates the birth of Maoism. To look upon them as brainless puppets being manipulated by a few middle-class Maoist ideologues is to do them something of a disservice. ~ Arundhati Roy