Top 350 Arundhati Roy Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

202. “You have come to a stage where you almost have to work on yourself. You know, on finding some tranquility with which to respond to these things, because I realize that the biggest risk that many of us run is beginning to get inured to the horrors.”

— Arundhati Roy

203. “In the year she knew him, before they were married, she discovered a little magic in herself, and for a while felt like a blithe genie released from a lamp. She was perhaps too young to realize that what she assumed was her love for Chacko was actually a tentative, timorous, acceptance of herself.”

— Arundhati Roy

204. “The infinite tenderness of motherhood and the reckless rage of a suicide bomber. It was this that grew inside her, and eventually led her to love by night the man her children loved.”

— Arundhati Roy

205. “So on the days that the radio played Ammu’s songs, people avoided her, made little loops around her, because everybody agreed that it was best to just Let Her Be.”

— Arundhati Roy

206. “Had he known that he was about to enter a tunnel whose only egress was his own annihilation, would he have turned away?”

— Arundhati Roy

207. “Om bhur bhuvah svaha Tat savitur varenyam Bhargo devasya dhimahi Dhiyo yo nah pracodayat O God, thou art the giver of life, Remover of pain and sorrow, Bestower of happiness, O Creator of the Universe, May we receive thy supreme sin-destroying light, May thou guide our intellect in the right direction.”

— Arundhati Roy

208. “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

209. “White-walled once. Red-roofed. But painted in weather-colors now. With brushes dipped in nature’s palette. Mossgreen. Earth-brown. Crumbleblack.”

— Arundhati Roy

210. “Sleep came to them, quick and easy, like money to millionaires.”

— Arundhati Roy

211. “Across the world, when governments and the media lavish all their time, attention, funds, research, space, sophistication, and seriousness on war talk and terrorism, then the message that goes out is disturbing and dangerous: If you seek to air and redress a public grievance, violence is more effective than non-violence. Unfortunately, if peaceful change is not given a chance, then violent change becomes inevitable.”

— Arundhati Roy

212. “She knew very well that she knew very well that she knew very well.”

— Arundhati Roy

213. “To whom did it matter? Did those to whom it mattered matter?”

— Arundhati Roy

214. “To be present in history, even as nothing more than a chuckle, was a universe away from being absent from it, from being written out of it altogether. A chuckle, after all, could become a foothold in the sheer wall of the future.”

— Arundhati Roy

215. “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

216. “Rahel’s “list” was an attempt to order chaos. She revised it constantly, torn forever between love and duty. It was by no means a true gauge of her feelings.”

— Arundhati Roy

217. “She kept her doors and windows locked, unless she was using them.”

— Arundhati Roy

218. “Democracy has become Empire’s euphemism for neo-liberal capitalism.”

— Arundhati Roy

219. “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

220. “Marxism was a simple substitute for Christianity. Replace God with Marx, Satan with the bourgeoisie, Heaven with a classless society, the Church with the Party, and the form and purpose of the journey remained similar. An obstacle race, with a prize at the end.”

— Arundhati Roy

221. “She woke to the sound of his heart knocking against his chest. As though it was searching for a way out.”

— Arundhati Roy

222. “With the certitude of a true believer, Vellya Paapen had assured the twins that there was no such thing in the world as a black cat. He said that there were only black cat chaped holes in the universe.”

— Arundhati Roy

223. “If you’ll pardon me for making this somewhat prosaic observation – maybe that’s what life is, or ends up being most of the time: a rehearsal for a performance that never eventually materializes.”

— Arundhati Roy

224. “She knew he’d be back. No matter how elaborate its charade, she recognized loneliness when she saw it. She sensed that in some strange tangential way, he needed her shade as much as she needed his. And she had learned from experience that Need was a warehouse that could accommodate a considerable amount of cruelty.”

— Arundhati Roy

225. “The room had kept his secrets. It gave nothing away. Not in the disarray of rumpled sheets, nor the untidiness of a kicked off shoe, or a wet towel hung over the back of a chair. Or a half-read book. It was like a room in a hospital after the nurse had just been. The floor was clean, the walls white. The cupboard closed. Shoes arranged. The dustbin empty.”

— Arundhati Roy

226. “Hope lies in texts that can accommodate and keep alive our intricacy, our complexity, and our density against the onslaught of the terrifying, sweeping simplifications of fascism.”

— Arundhati Roy

227. “Making bombs will only destroy us. It doesn’t matter whether we use them or not. They will destroy us either way.”

— Arundhati Roy

228. “She wondered how to un-know certain things, certain specific things that she knew but did not wish to know. How to un-know, for example, that when people died of stone-dust, their lungs refused to be cremated.”

— Arundhati Roy

229. “It’s odd how those who dismiss the peace movement as Utopian proffer the most absurdly dreamy reasons for war.”

— Arundhati Roy

230. “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

231. “Nietzsche believed that if Pity were to become the core of ethics, misery would become contagious and happiness an object of suspicion.”

— Arundhati Roy

232. “Something lay buried in the ground. Under grass. Under twenty-three years of June rain. A small forgotten thing. Nothing that the world would miss. A child’s plastic wristwatch with the time painted on it. Ten to two, it said.”

— Arundhati Roy

233. “My writing is translated into every Indian language, it’s distributed in pamphlets, in little private video things, it’s everywhere. So it’s a lovely pastime for the middle class to think of itself as the whole nation.”

— Arundhati Roy

234. “She gave the impression that she had somehow slipped off her leash. As though she was taking herself for a walk while the rest of us were being walked – like pets. As.”

— Arundhati Roy

235. “What Larry McCaslin saw in Rahel’s eyes was not despair at all, but a sort of enforced optimism. And a hollow where Estha’s words’ had been. He couldn’t be expected to understand that. That the emptiness in one twin was only a version of the quietness in the other. That the two things fitted together. Like stacked spoons. Like familiar lovers’ bodies.”

— Arundhati Roy

236. “In the end it didn’t matter of course.”

— Arundhati Roy

237. “The world’s ‘freeest’ country has the highest number in prison.”

— Arundhati Roy

238. “The Marxists worked from within the communal divides, never challenging them, never appearing not to. They offered a cocktail revolution. A heady mix of Eastern Marxism and orthodox Hinduism, spiked with a shot of democracy.”

— Arundhati Roy

239. “Why should propaganda be the exclusive preserve of the Western media? Just because they do it better?”

— Arundhati Roy

240. “The doors had not two, but four shutters of paneled teak so that in the old days, ladies could keep the bottom half closed, lean their elbows on the ledge and bargain with visiting vendors without betraying themselves below the waist. Technically, they could buy carpets, or bangles, with their breasts covered and their bottoms bare. Technically.”

— Arundhati Roy

241. “People – communities, castes, races and even countries – carry their tragic histories and their misfortunes around like trophies, or like stock, to be bought and sold on the open market.”

— Arundhati Roy

242. “A bee died in a coffin flower.”

— Arundhati Roy

243. “It’s a battle of those who know how to think against those who know how to hate. A battle of lovers against haters. It’s an unequal battle, because the love is on the street and vulnerable. The hate is on the street, too, but it is armed to the teeth, and protected by all the machinery of the state.”

— Arundhati Roy

244. “I’d say that the only thing worth globalizing is dissent. It’s India’s best export.”

— Arundhati Roy

245. “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

246. “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

247. “She said, “I’m not marrying anybody.” When I asked her why she felt that way, she said she wanted to be free to die irresponsibly, without notice and for no reason.”

— Arundhati Roy

248. “And we, my dears, everything we are and ever will be are just a twinkle in her eye,.”

— Arundhati Roy

249. “The practice of untouchability, cruel as it was- the broom tied to the waist, the pot hung around the neck- was the performative, ritualistic end of the practice of caste. The real violence of the caste was the denial of entitlement: to land, to wealth, to knowledge, to equal opportunity.”

— Arundhati Roy

250. “Reading Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar bridges the gap between what most Indians are schooled to believe in and the reality we experience every day of our lives.”

— Arundhati Roy