Quotes from Arundhati Roy

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.

Et tu, Caesar? Then fall, Caesar. Et tu, Estha? Then fall, Estha.

Empathy sometimes achieves what scholarship cannot

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.

He gathered her into the cave of his body. (Roy,338)

One of her ambitions was to own a watch on which she could change the time whenever she wanted to (which according to her was what Time was meant for in the first place)

It was the kind of time in the life of a family when something happens to nudge its hidden morality from its resting place and make it bubble to the surface and float for a while. In clear view. For everyone to see.

And on Ammu's road (to Age and Death) a small, sunny meadow appeared. Copper grass spangled with blue butterflies. Beyond it, an abyss.

A quiet bubble floating on a sea of noise. (Estha)

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.

Rahel never wrote to him. There are things that you can't do—like writing letters to a part of yourself.

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.

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.

The nights are clear but suffused with sloth and sullen expectation.

Suddenly Ammu hoped that it had been him that Rahel saw him in the march. She hoped it had been him that raised his flag and knotted arm in anger. She hoped that under his careful cloak of cheerfulness he housed a living breathing anger against the smug, ordered world that she raged against.

Although you know that one day you will die, you live as if you won't.

Ammu, Chako said, his voice steady and deliberately casual, is it at all possible for you to prevent your washed-up cynicism from completely coloring everything? Silence filled the car like a saturated sponge. 'Washed-up' cut like a knife through a soft thing. The sun shone with a shuddering sigh. This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt.

Coercing a woman out of a burka is as bad as coercing her into one. It's not about the burka. It's about the coercion.

Hide!' she whispered. 'The vegetarians are coming.

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.

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

painted in weather-colors now. With brushes dipped in nature's palette. Mossgreen. Earth-brown. Crumbleblack

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

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