Top 350 Arundhati Roy Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “To call someone ‘anti-American’, indeed, to be anti-American, is not just racist, it’s a failure of the imagination.”

— Arundhati Roy

302. “In an old war, everybody has an ax to grind.”

— Arundhati Roy

303. “But for now, it even has a Gandhian approach to sabotage; before a police vehicle is burnt for example, it is stripped down and every part is cannibalized. The steering wheel is straightened out and made into a bharmaar barrel, the rexine upholstery stripped and used for ammunition pouches, the battery for solar charging. Should I write a play I wonder- Gandhi Get Your Gun. Or will I be lynched?”

— Arundhati Roy

304. “When the last soldier has gone, the people climb over the debris of the burnt house. The tin sheets that were once the roof are still smouldering. A scorched trunk lies open, flames still leaping out of it. What was in it that burns so beautifully?”

— Arundhati Roy

305. “Foreigners only see what they want to see. Earlier it was snake charmers and sadhus, now it is the superpower things, the Bazaar Raj.”

— Arundhati Roy

306. “I would like to write one of those sophisticated stories in which even though nothing much happens there’s lots to write about.”

— Arundhati Roy

307. “The foreign newspapers had dumped the old exotics in favor of the younger generation. The exotics didn’t suit the image of the New India – a nuclear power and an emerging destination for international finance. Ustad.”

— Arundhati Roy

308. “For the first time in her life, Tilo felt that her body had enough room to accomodate all of its organs.”

— Arundhati Roy

309. “The crowd made room for the press respectfully. It knew that without the journalists and photographers the massacre would be erased and the dead would truly die. So the bodies were offered to them, in hope and anger. A banquet of death.”

— Arundhati Roy

310. “In a while he reached across the table and took her hand in his. He could not have known that he was trying to comfort a building that had been struck by lightning.”

— Arundhati Roy

311. “We need an updated insurance plan against our won basic natures.”

— Arundhati Roy

312. “It had to do with the way she lived, in the country of her own skin. A country that issued no visas and seemed to have no consulates.”

— Arundhati Roy

313. “They’re mostly rich folk who live in our poor country like captive animals, incarcerated by their own wealth, locked and barred in their gilded cages, protecting themselves from the threat of the vulgar and unruly multitudes whom they have systematically dispossessed over the centuries.”

— Arundhati Roy

314. “Oddly, neglect seemed to have resulted in an accidental release of the spirit.”

— Arundhati Roy

315. “In every part of the legendary Valley of Kashmir, whatever people might be doing – walking, praying, bathing, cracking jokes, shelling walnuts, making love or taking a bus-ride home – they were in the rifle-sights of a soldier. And because they were in the rifle-sights of a soldier, whatever they might be doing – walking, praying, bathing, cracking jokes, shelling walnuts, making love or taking a bus-ride home – they were a legitimate target.”

— Arundhati Roy

316. “All we seem to be left with now is paranoid gibberish about a War on Terror whose whole purpose is to expand the War, increase the Terror, and obfuscate the fact that the wars of today are not aberrations but systemic, logical exercises to preserve a way of life whose delicate pleasures and exquisite comforts can only be delivered to the chosen few by a continuous, protracted war for hegemony – Lifestyle Wars.”

— Arundhati Roy

317. “And so, in these ways, in order to please Zainab, Anjum began to rewrite a simpler, happier life for herself. The rewriting in turn began to make Anjum a simpler, happier person.”

— Arundhati Roy

318. “In the years to come, when the war became a way of life, there would be books and films and photo exhibitions curated around the theme of Kashmir’s grief and loss.”

— Arundhati Roy

319. “She could hear her hair growing.”

— Arundhati Roy

320. “D’you know why God made Hijras? It was an experiment. He decided to create something, a living creature that is incapable of happiness. So he made us.”

— Arundhati Roy

321. “They were State-of-the-Art machines. They could flatten history and stack it up like building material.”

— Arundhati Roy

322. “Ammu recognized vaguely that her thoughts were shot with a delicate, purple tinge of envy. She didn’t allow herself to consider who it was that she envied. The man or her own child. Or just their world of hooked fingers and sudden smiles.”

— Arundhati Roy

323. “All they have to do is to turn around and shoot. All the people have to do is to lie down and die.”

— Arundhati Roy

324. “He looked cheerful, as though he was with an imaginary friend whose company he enjoyed.”

— Arundhati Roy

325. “Empathy sometimes achieves what scholarship cannot.”

— Arundhati Roy

326. “Indian nationalists and the government seem to believe that they can fortify their idea of a resurgent India with a combination of bullying and Boeing airplanes. But they don’t understand the subversive strength of warm boiled eggs.”

— Arundhati Roy

327. “Terrorism is vicious, ugly, and dehumanizing for its perpetrators as well as its victims. But so is war. You could says that terrorism is the privatization of war. Terrorists are the free marketeers of war. They are people who don’t believe that the state has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.”

— Arundhati Roy

328. “Not everybody likes the idea of their cities filling up with the poor. A judge in Bombay called slum dwellers pickpockets of urban land. Another said, while ordering the bulldozing of unauthorized colonies, that people who couldn’t afford to live in cities shouldn’t live in them. When those who had been evicted went back to where they came from, they found their villages had disappeared under great dams and dusty quarries.”

— Arundhati Roy

329. “She thought of Chacko’s laugh, and a smile stayed in her eyes for a long time.”

— Arundhati Roy

330. “History in live performance.”

— Arundhati Roy

331. “I am an artist and a writer, and I do think that one always places oneself in the picture to see where one fits.”

— Arundhati Roy

332. “While the Doctor was searching for a more lasting cure, the Saint journeyed across India distributing a placebo.”

— Arundhati Roy

333. “The steep tiled roof had grown dark and mossy with age and rain. The triangular wooden frames fitted into the gables were intricately carved, the light that slanted through them and fell in patterns on the floor was full of secrets. Wolves. Flowers. Iguanas. Changing shape as the sun moved through the sky. Dying punctually at Dusk.”

— Arundhati Roy

334. “The Congress has historically played covert communal politics in order to create what in India we call vote banks where you pit one community against another and so on in order to secure votes.”

— Arundhati Roy

335. “But Kama the Generous could not refuse his mother what she asked of him. So he modified the promise. Equivocated. Made a small adjustment, took a somewhat altered oath.”

— Arundhati Roy

336. “Sitting next to Tilo, breathing next to her, he felt like an empty house whose locked windows and doors were creaking open a little, to air the ghosts trapped inside it.”

— Arundhati Roy

337. “India lives in several centuries at the same time.”

— Arundhati Roy

338. “The place for literature is built by writers and readers. It’s a fragile place in some ways, but an indestructible one. When it’s broken, we rebuild it. Because we need shelter. I very much like the idea of literature that is needed. Literature that provides shelter. Shelter of all kinds.”

— Arundhati Roy

339. “Margaret Kochamma found herself drawn towards him like a plant in a dark room towards a wedge of light.”

— Arundhati Roy

340. “For one struck down by Cupid’s bow Life becomes burdensome, isn’t that so?”

— Arundhati Roy

341. “He didn’t know that in some places, like the country that Rahel came from, various kinds of despair competed for primacy. And that personal despair could never be desperate enough.”

— Arundhati Roy

342. “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

343. “Ironically, the era of the free market has led to the most successful secessionist struggle ever waged in India – the secession of the middle and upper classes to a country of their own, somewhere up in the stratosphere where they merge with the rest of the world’s elite. This Kingdom in the Sky is a complete universe in itself, hermetically sealed from the rest of India. It has its own newspapers, films, television programmes, morality plays, transport systems, malls, and intellectuals.”

— Arundhati Roy

344. “Some things come with their own punishments. Like bedrooms with built-in cupboards. They would all learn more about punishments soon. That they came in different sizes. That some were so big they were like cupboards with built-in bedrooms.”

— Arundhati Roy

345. “There’s a lot of money in poverty, and a few Nobel Prizes too.”

— Arundhati Roy

346. “Indians who valorize their own struggle for independence from British rule and virtually worship those who led it are for the most part strangely opaque to Kashmiris who are fighting for the same thing.”

— Arundhati Roy

347. “India asks us, ‘Why do you throw stones?’ No one asks, ‘Who burned your house down?”

— Arundhati Roy

348. “History has been unkind to Ambedkar. First it contained him, and then it glorified him. It has made him India’s Leader of the Untouchables, the King of the Ghetto. It has hidden away his writings. It has stripped away the radical intellect and the searing insolence.”

— Arundhati Roy

349. “He made her feel as though the world belonged to them...”

— Arundhati Roy

350. “It was possible for Tilo and Musa to have this strange conversation about a third loved one, because they were concurrently sweethearts and ex-sweethearts, lovers and ex-lovers, siblings and ex-siblings, classmates and ex-classmates. Because they trusted each other so peculiarly that they knew, even if they were hurt by it, that whoever it was that the other person loved had to be worth loving. In matters of the heart, they had a virtual forest of safety nets.”

— Arundhati Roy