Top 350 Arundhati Roy Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”

— Arundhati Roy

2. “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

3. “If you’re happy in a dream, does that count?”

— Arundhati Roy

4. “Use your art to fight.”

— Arundhati Roy

5. “Things can change in a day.”

— Arundhati Roy

6. “Empathy may be the single most important quality that must be nurtured to give peace a fighting chance.”

— Arundhati Roy

7. “D’you know what happens when you hurt people?’ Ammu said. ‘When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.”

— Arundhati Roy

8. “That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.”

— Arundhati Roy

9. “Literature is the opposite of a nuclear bomb.”

— Arundhati Roy

10. “And the air was full of Thoughts and Things to Say. But at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. Big Things lurk unsaid inside.”

— Arundhati Roy

11. “Change is one thing. Acceptance is another.”

— Arundhati Roy

12. “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

13. “Non-violence is a piece of theatre. You need an audience. What can you do when you have no audience?”

— Arundhati Roy

14. “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

15. “People always loved best what they identified most with.”

— Arundhati Roy

16. “It was a time when the unthinkable became the thinkable and the impossible really happened.”

— Arundhati Roy

17. “One beach-colored. One brown. One Loved. One Loved a Little Less.”

— Arundhati Roy

18. “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

19. “The American way of life is not sustainable. It doesn’t acknowledge that there is a world beyond America.”

— Arundhati Roy

20. “Humans are animals of habit.”

— Arundhati Roy

21. “What came for them? Not death. Just the end of living.”

— Arundhati Roy

22. “Wars are never fought for altruistic reasons. They’re usually fought for hegemony, for business. And then of course there’s the business of war.”

— Arundhati Roy

23. “Is globalization about ‘the eradication of world poverty,’ or is it a mutant variety of colonialism, remote controlled and digitally operated?”

— Arundhati Roy

24. “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

25. “Either way, change will come. It could be bloody, or it could be beautiful. It depends on us.”

— Arundhati Roy

26. “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

27. “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

28. “Terrorism is the symptom, not the disease.”

— Arundhati Roy

29. “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

30. “Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century.”

— Arundhati Roy

31. “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

32. “Her grief grieved her. His devastated her.”

— Arundhati Roy

33. “Poverty is a crime and the poor are terrorists.”

— Arundhati Roy

34. “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

35. “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

36. “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

37. “The way her body existed only where he touched her. The rest of her was smoke.”

— Arundhati Roy

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38. “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

39. “Ammu said that human beings were creatures of habit, and it was amazing the kind of things one could get used to.”

— Arundhati Roy

40. “The only dream worth having is to dream that you will live while you are alive, and die only when you are dead. To love, to be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and vulgar disparity of the 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

41. “Smells, like music, hold memories. She breathed deep, and bottled it up for posterity.”

— Arundhati Roy

42. “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

43. “I think that I was quite a grown-up child, and I have been a pretty childish adult.”

— Arundhati Roy

44. “Of course, there’s an alternative to terrorism: it’s called justice.”

— Arundhati Roy

45. “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

46. “Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Suddenly, they become the bleached bones of a story.”

— Arundhati Roy

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47. “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

48. “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

49. “People rarely win wars, governments rarely lose them. People get killed. Governments moult and regroup, hydra-headed. They use flags first to shrink-wrap people’s minds and smother thought, and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury their willing dead.”

— Arundhati Roy

50. “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