Top 350 Arundhati Roy Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “Life went on. Death went on. The war went on.”

— Arundhati Roy

253. “She wondered what an unreleased soul, a soul-shaped stone on a funeral pyre, might look like. Like a starfish maybe. Or a millipede. Or a dappled moth with a living body and stone wings – poor moth – betrayed, held down by the very things that were meant to help it to fly.”

— Arundhati Roy

254. “If you think of the world as a global village, a fight between India and Pakistan is like a fight between the poorest people in the poorest quarters – the Adivasis and the Dalits. And in the meantime, the zamindars are laying the oil pipelines and selling both parties weapons.”

— Arundhati Roy

255. “I soon learned that Dandakaranya, the forest I was about to enter, was full of people who had many names and fluid identities. It was like balm to me, that idea. How lovely not to be stuck with yourself, to become someone else for a while.”

— Arundhati Roy

256. “She thought of the city at night, of cities at night. Discarded constellations of old stars, fallen from the sky, rearranged on Earth in patterns and pathways and towers. Invaded by weevils that have learned to walk upright.”

— Arundhati Roy

257. “The people who created the crisis will not be the ones that come up with a solution.”

— Arundhati Roy

258. “Poetry, music and literature, he believed, ought not to be interrupted by the banality of war.”

— Arundhati Roy

259. “Ammu shook her and told her to Stoppit and she Stoppited.”

— Arundhati Roy

260. “In the last photograph of her, the bullet wound looked like a cheerful summer rose arranged just above her left ear. A few petals had fallen on her kaffan, the white shroud she was wrapped in before she was laid to rest.”

— Arundhati Roy

261. “For the Time Being they had no surname because Ammu was considering reverting to her maiden name, though she said that choosing between her husband‘s name and her fathers name didn’t give a woman much of a choice.”

— Arundhati Roy

262. “The TV channels never ran out of sponsorship for their live telecasts of despair. They never ran out of despair.”

— Arundhati Roy

263. “Torture has been privatized now, so you have obviously the whole scandal in America about the abuse of prisoners and the fact that, army people might be made to pay a price, but who are the privatized torturers accountable to?”

— Arundhati Roy

264. “She wasn’t a woman who smiled and said hello.”

— Arundhati Roy

265. “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

266. “I really worry about these political people that have no personal life. If there’s nothing that’s lovely, and if there’s nothing that’s just ephemeral, that you can just lie on the floor and bust a gut laughing at, then what’s the point?”

— Arundhati Roy

267. “There was no tour guide on hand to tell her that in Kashmir nightmares were promiscuous. They were unfaithful to their owners, they cartwheeled wantonly into other people’s dreams, they acknowledged no precincts, they were the greatest ambush artists of all. No fortification, no fence-building could keep them in check. In Kashmir the only thing to do with nightmares was to embrace them like old friends and manage them like old enemies.”

— Arundhati Roy

268. “All my books are accidental books – they come from reacting to things and thinking about things and engaging in a real way. They are not about, ‘Oh, did it get a good review in the Guardian?’ I don’t care.”

— Arundhati Roy

269. “But it’s hard to say where experience ends and imagination begins. The story is by no means a true story. But the feelings in it are.”

— Arundhati Roy

270. “Who was he mourning? She didn’t know. A whole generation maybe.”

— Arundhati Roy

271. “He sensed she was drifting on a tide that neither he nor she could do much about. He couldn’t tell whether her restlessness, her compulsive and increasingly unsafe wandering through the city, marked the onset of an unsoundness of mind or an acute, perilous kind of sanity. Or were they both the same thing?”

— Arundhati Roy

272. “Diclofenac, cow aspirin, given to cattle as a muscle relaxant, to ease pain and increase the production of milk, works – worked – like nerve gas on white-backed vultures. Each chemically relaxed, milk-producing cow or buffalo that died became poisoned vulture bait.”

— Arundhati Roy

273. “If you’re not religious, then look at it this way. This world of ours is four thousand, six hundred million years old. It could end in an afternoon.”

— Arundhati Roy

274. “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

275. “Destroying us. You are constructing us. It’s yourselves that you are destroying.”

— Arundhati Roy

276. “Rahel knew that this had happened because she had been hoping that it wouldn’t. She hadn’t learned to control her Hopes yet.”

— Arundhati Roy

277. “Funding as fragmented solidarity in ways that repression never could.”

— Arundhati Roy

278. “Faced with the Real World, she clung nervously to old remembered rules, and had no one but herself to rebel against.”

— Arundhati Roy

279. “I would like to write one of those sophisticated stories in which even though nothing much happens there’s lots to write about. That can’t be done in Kashmir. It’s not sophisticated, what happens here. There’s too much blood for good literature.”

— Arundhati Roy

280. “Of the four things that were Possible in Human Nature, Rahel thought that Infinnate Joy sounded the saddest.”

— Arundhati Roy

281. “Writers imagine that they cull stories from the world. I’m beginning to believe that vanity makes them think so. That it’s actually the other way around. Stories cull writers from the world. Stories reveal themselves to us. The public narrative, the private narrative – they colonize us. They commission us. They insist on being told. Fiction and nonfiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons that I don’t fully understand, fiction dances out of me, and nonfiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.”

— Arundhati Roy

282. “But eventually, the Elixir of the Soul that had survived wars and the bloody birth of three new countries, was, like most things in the world, trumped by Coca-Cola.”

— Arundhati Roy

283. “The strange thing about Roman soldiers in the comics was the amount of trouble they took over their armor and their helmets, and then, after all that, they left their legs bare. It didn’t make any sense at all. Weatherwise or otherwise.”

— Arundhati Roy

284. “No matter how elaborate its charade, she recognized loneliness when she saw it.”

— Arundhati Roy

285. “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

286. “Like cities. Fizzy, effervescent, simulating the illusion of life while the planet they had plundered died around them.”

— Arundhati Roy

287. “I think many people were surprised by the victory of the Congress, because it was really hard to see beyond the sort of haze of hatred that the Hindu nationalists had been spreading.”

— Arundhati Roy

288. “The UID is a corporate scam which funnels billions of dollars into the IT sector.”

— Arundhati Roy

289. “Sitting between the two professors, I enjoyed their contradictory advice. I sat there smiling, thinking of the first message I received from John Berger. It was a beautiful handwritten letter, from a writer who had been my hero for years: ‘Your fiction and nonfiction – they walk you around the world like your two legs.’ That settled it for me.”

— Arundhati Roy

290. “Questions signified a vulgar display of ignorance.”

— Arundhati Roy

291. “All three of them bonded by the certain, separate knowledge that they had loved a man to death.”

— Arundhati Roy

292. “Thinking made her throat ache. That was a good reason not to think about seeing a psychiatrist.”

— Arundhati Roy

293. “People often don’t understand the engine that drives corruption. Particularly in India, they assume government equals corruption, private companies equal efficiency. But government officials are not genetically programmed to be corrupt. Corruption is linked to power. If it is the corporations that are powerful, then they will be corrupt.”

— Arundhati Roy

294. “Crashing through the world like a falling stone. It is his color and his light. It is the vessel into which he pours.”

— Arundhati Roy

295. “The truth is that she traveled back to Kashmir to still her troubled heart, and to atone for a crime she hadn’t committed.”

— Arundhati Roy

296. “When the sun grew hot, they returned indoors where they continued to float through their lives like a pair of astronauts, defying gravity, limited only by the outer walls of their fuchsia spaceship with its pale pistachio doors. It isn’t as though they didn’t have plans. Anjum waited to die. Saddam waited to kill.”

— Arundhati Roy

297. “The frozen flowers never go away. They hang around somewhere all the time.”

— Arundhati Roy

298. “Going to Oxford didn’t necessarily make a person clever.”

— Arundhati Roy

299. “Somehow the idea of dictating things, Tilo said, seemed to make her mother feel that she was still the captain of the ship, still in charge of something, and that calmed her down considerably.”

— Arundhati Roy

300. “It’s a battle of those who know how to think against those who know how to hate.”

— Arundhati Roy