Top 350 Arundhati Roy Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “There is a war that makes us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.”

— Arundhati Roy

54. “That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much.”

— Arundhati Roy

55. “NGOs are dangerous. They do what the missionaries used to do in Colonial times. They are Trojan Horses. The worse the situation, the more the NGOs.”

— Arundhati Roy

56. “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

57. “It was raining when Rahel came back to Ayemenem. Slanting silver ropes slammed into loose earth, plowing it up like gunfire. The old house on the hill wore its steep, gabled roof pulled over its ears like a low hat.”

— Arundhati Roy

58. “Insanity hovered close at hand, like an eager waiter at an expensive restaurant.”

— Arundhati Roy

59. “Many people have accused me of having a romantic view, whereas I personally I feel sorry for those who have lost romance in their lives.”

— Arundhati Roy

60. “Flat muscled and honey coloured. Sea secrets in his eyes. A silver raindrop in his ear.”

— Arundhati Roy

61. “To stay quiet is as political an act as speaking out.”

— Arundhati Roy

62. “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

63. “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

64. “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

65. “Some things come with their own punishments.”

— Arundhati Roy

66. “Madness slunk in through a chink in History. It only took a moment.”

— Arundhati Roy

67. “Excitement always leads to tears.”

— Arundhati Roy

68. “Wars are never fought for altruistic reasons.”

— Arundhati Roy

69. “This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt.”

— Arundhati Roy

70. “Old. A viable die-able age.”

— Arundhati Roy

71. “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

72. “And there it was again. Another religion turned against itself. Another edifice constructed by the human mind, decimated by human nature.”

— Arundhati Roy

73. “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

74. “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

75. “The moment I saw her, a part of me walked out of my body and wrapped itself around her. And there it still remains.”

— Arundhati Roy

76. “Humbling was a nice word, Rahel thought. Humbling along without a care in the world.”

— Arundhati Roy

77. “These days in Kashmir, you can be killed for surviving.”

— Arundhati Roy

78. “He could do only one thing at a time. If he held her, he couldn’t kiss her. If he kissed her, he couldn’t see her. If he saw her, he couldn’t feel her.”

— Arundhati Roy

79. “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

80. “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

81. “The first step towards reimagining a world gone terribly wrong would be to stop the annihilation of those a different imagination – an imagination that is outside of Capitalism as well as Communism. An imagination that has an altogether different understanding of what constitutes happiness and fulfillment.”

— Arundhati Roy

82. “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

83. “Estha carried them home in the crowded train. A quite bubble floating in a sea of noise.”

— Arundhati Roy

84. “Once you have fallen off the edge like all of us have, including our Biroo,” Anjum said, “you will never stop falling. And as you fall you will hold on to other falling people. The sooner you understand that the better. This place where we live, where we have made our home, is the place of falling people. Here there is no haqeeqat. Arre, even we aren’t real. We don’t really exist.”

— Arundhati Roy

85. “I am weary of worldly gatherings, O Lord What pleasure in them, when the light in my heart is gone? From the clamor of crowds I flee, my heart seeks The kind of silence that would mesmerize speech itself.”

— Arundhati Roy

86. “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

87. “The word Hijra, she said, meant a Body in which a Holy Soul lives.”

— Arundhati Roy

88. “Pigs are horses. Girls are boys. War is peace.”

— Arundhati Roy

89. “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

90. “History is really a study of the future, not the past.”

— Arundhati Roy

91. “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

92. “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

93. “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.”

— Arundhati Roy

94. “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

95. “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

96. “And a strange, deadly war is raging around the world. Yet, each person who has lost a loved one surely knows secretly, deeply, that no war, no act of revenge, no daisy-cutters dropped on someone else’s loved ones or someone else’s children, will blunt the edges of their pain or bring their own loved ones back. War cannot avenge those who have died. War is only a brutal desecration of their memory.”

— Arundhati Roy

97. “Is this Democracy or Demon Crazy?”

— Arundhati Roy

98. “With Partition, in 1947, Roy writes, “God’s carotid burst open on the new border between India and Pakistan and a million people died of hatred. Neighbours turned on each other as though they’d never known each other, never been to each other’s weddings, never sung each other’s songs.” The consequences of that terrible event form the main story of “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.”

— Arundhati Roy

99. “Let’s leave one alive so that it can be lonely.”

— Arundhati Roy

100. “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