Quotes from Arundhati Roy

Democracy has become Empire's euphemism for neo-liberal capitalism.

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.

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

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

Breathe gently here, for with fragility all is fraught, Here, in this workshop of the world, where wares of glass are wrought

Women are not allowed. Women are not allowed. Women are not allowed. Was it to protect the grave from the women or the women from the grave?

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

b.] be prepared to be prepared.

Ammu wondered at the transparency of that kiss. It was a clear-as-glass kiss. Unclouded by passion or desire . . . . It was a kiss that demanded no kiss-back. Not a cloudy kiss full of questions that wanted answers.

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. Men's Needs.

They looked cheerful in the photograph, Lenin and his wife. As though they had a new refrigerator in their drawing room, and a down payment on a DDA flat.

The question is, can poverty be simulated? Poverty, after all, is not just a question of having no money or no possessions. Poverty is about having no power. The battle of the poor and the powerless is one of reclamation, not renunciation.

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.

At least not until the Terror took hold of him. Not until he saw, night after night, a little boat being rowed across the river. Not until he saw it return at dawn. Not until he saw what his Untouchable son had touched. More than touched. Enter. Loved.

Man's subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify

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.

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

History would be a revelation of the future as much as it was a study of the past.

History's smell. Like old roses on a breeze. It would lurk forever in ordinary things. In coat hangers. Tomatoes. In the tar on roads. In certain colours. In the plates at a restaurant. In the absence of words. And the emptiness in eyes.

Their lives have a size and a shape now. Estha has his and Rahel hers. Edges, Borders, Boundaries, Brinks and Limits have appeared like a team of trolls on their separate horizons. Short creatures with long shadows, patrolling the Blurry End. Gentle half-moons have gathered under their eyes and they are as old as Ammu was when she died. Thirty-one. Not old. Not young. But a viable die-able age.

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.

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.

Normalcy was declared. (Normalcy was always a declaration.)

The US empire rests on a grisly foundation: the massacre of millions of indigenous people, the stealing of their lands and, following this, the kidnapping and enslavement of millions of black people from Africa to work that land. Thousands died on the seas while they were being shipped like caged cattle between continents. 'Stolen from Africa, brought to America' - Bob Marley's 'Buffalo Soldier' contains a whole universe of unspeakable sadness.