Top 350 Arundhati Roy Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Man’s subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify.”

— Arundhati Roy

152. “Was it possible to live outside language? Naturally this question did not address itself to her in words, or as a single lucid sentence. It addressed itself to her as a soundless, embryonic howl.”

— Arundhati Roy

153. “It could be argued that it began long before Christianity arrived in a boat and seeped into Kerala like tea from a teabag.”

— Arundhati Roy

154. “I feel ashamed that the new, nuclear, neo-liberal India thinks of itself as a ‘natural ally’ of Israel. Ever since India began to call itself an emerging superpower, it has become a slavish, groveling satellite state of the US.”

— Arundhati Roy

155. “Even in the most uneventful of our lives, we are called upon to choose our battles...”

— Arundhati Roy

156. “I use the word love loosely, and only because my vocabulary is unequal to the task of describing the precise nature of that maze, that forest of feelings.”

— Arundhati Roy

157. “One day Kashmir will make India self-destruct in the same way. You may have blinded all of us, every one of us, with your pellet guns by then. But you will still have eyes to see what you have done to us. You’re not destroying us. You are constructing us. It’s yourselves that you are destroying. Khuda Hafiz.”

— Arundhati Roy

158. “The boat that Ammu would use to cross the river. To love by night the man her children loved by day.”

— Arundhati Roy

159. “Our sorrows will never be sad enough. Our joys never happy enough. Our dreams never big enough. Our lives never important enough. To matter.”

— Arundhati Roy

160. “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

161. “He broke the eggs but burned the omelette.”

— Arundhati Roy

162. “She viewed ethnic cleansing, famine and genocide as direct threats to her furniture.”

— Arundhati Roy

163. “In those early amorphous years when memory had only just begun, when life was full of Beginnings and no Ends, and Everything was Forever, Esthappen and Rahel thought of themselves together as Me, and separately, individually, as We or Us. As though they were a rare breed of Siamese twins, physically separate, but with joint identities.”

— Arundhati Roy

164. “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

165. “Dark of Heartness tiptoed into the Heart of Darkness.”

— Arundhati Roy

166. “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

167. “She speaks the most beautiful Urdu.”

— Arundhati Roy

168. “Impelled by feelings that were primal yet paradoxically wholly impersonal. 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.”

— Arundhati Roy

169. “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

170. “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

171. “There are other worlds. Other kinds of dreams. Dreams in which failure is feasible. Honourable. Sometimes even worth striving for. Worlds in which recognition is not the only barometer of brilliance or human worth.”

— Arundhati Roy

172. “The trees were still green, the sky still blue, which counted for something. So they went ahead and plugged their smelly paradise – God’s Own Country they called it in their brochures – because they knew, those clever Hotel People, that smelliness, like other peoples’ poverty, was merely a matter of getting used to. A question of discipline. Of Rigor and Air-conditioning. Nothing more.”

— Arundhati Roy

173. “Perhaps it’s true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes. And that when they do, those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned house – the charred clock, the singed photograph, the scorched furniture – must be resurrected from the ruins and examined. Preserved. Accounted for. Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story.”

— Arundhati Roy

174. “That a woman that they had already damned, now had little left to lose, and could therefore be dangerous.”

— Arundhati Roy

175. “An unmixable mix. The infinite tenderness of motherhood and the reckless rage of a suicide bomber.”

— Arundhati Roy

176. “It was herself she was exhausted by. She had lost the ability to keep her discrete worlds discrete – a skill that many consider to be the cornerstone of sanity. 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

177. “When you recreate the image of man, why repeat God’s mistakes?”

— Arundhati Roy

178. “Mohabbat goliyon se bo rahe ho Watan ka chehra khoon se dho rahe ho Gumaan tum ko ke rasta katt raha hai Yaqeen mujhko ke manzil kho rahe ho.”

— Arundhati Roy

179. “A few months later Miss Mitten was killed by a milk van in Hobart, across the road from a cricket oval. To the twins there was hidden justice in the fact that the milk van had been reversing.”

— Arundhati Roy

180. “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

181. “Her collarbones like wings that spread from the base of her throat to the ends of her shoulders. A bird held down by skin.”

— Arundhati Roy

182. “Rahel never wrote to him. There are things that you can’t do – like writing letters to a part of yourself.”

— Arundhati Roy

183. “So here we have it. The equivocating distinction between civilisation and savagery, between the “massacre of innocent people” or, if you like, “a clash of civilisations” and “collateral damage”. The sophistry and fastidious algebra of infinite justice.”

— Arundhati Roy

184. “Certainly no beast has essayed the boundless, infinitely inventive art of human hatred. No beast can match its range and power.”

— Arundhati Roy

185. “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

186. “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

187. “Does a country fall into fascism the way a person falls in love? Or, more accurately, in hate?”

— Arundhati Roy

188. “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

189. “He tells stories of the gods, but his yarn is spun from the ungodly, human heart.”

— Arundhati Roy

190. “How history negotiates its terms and collects its dues from those who break its laws.”

— Arundhati Roy

191. “Fiction is the most joyous, beautiful, sophisticated, wonderful thing in the world.”

— Arundhati Roy

192. “She wondered how to un-know certain things, certain specific things that she knew but did not wish to know.”

— Arundhati Roy

193. “His gratitude widened his smile and bent his back.”

— Arundhati Roy

194. “She wasn’t beautiful in the way Bombay Silk was, but she was sexier, more intriguing, handsome in the way some women can be.”

— Arundhati Roy

195. “The connection between racism and casteism was made more than a century before the 2001 Durban conference. Empathy sometimes achieves what scholarship cannot.”

— Arundhati Roy

196. “In moments of crisis it helps to take the long view.”

— Arundhati Roy

197. “Must we behave like some damn godforsaken tribe that’s just been discovered?”

— Arundhati Roy

198. “It is such a supreme folly to believe that nuclear weapons are deadly only if they’re used.”

— Arundhati Roy

199. “In order to detach caste from the political economy, from conditions of enslavement in which most dalits lived and worked, in order to slide the questions of entitlement, land reforms and the redistribution of wealth, Hindu reformers cleverly narrowed the question of caste to the issue of untouchability. They framed it as an erroneous religious and cultural practice that needed to be reformed.”

— Arundhati Roy

200. “But can we, should we, let apprehensions about the future immobilize us in the present?”

— Arundhati Roy