Quotes from Arundhati Roy

It was not entirely his fault that he lived in a society where a man's death could be more profitable than his life had ever been.

It had been quiet in Estha's head until Rahel came. But with her she had brought the sound of passing trains, and the light and shade that falls on you if you have a window seat.

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?

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.

To whom did it matter? Did those to whom it mattered matter?

History is really a study of the future, not the past.

The frozen flowers never go away. They hang around somewhere all the time. I think we need to talk about vases. Did you hear the sound of the white flower?

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.

There is really no such thing as the voiceless. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.

Dark of Heartness tiptoed into the Heart of Darkness.

Ammu shook her and told her to Stoppit and she Stoppited.

As a writer, one spends a lifetime journeying into the heart of language, trying to minimize, if not eliminate, the distance between language and thought.

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

She described how, when her brother's body was found in a field and brought home, his fists, clenched in rigor mortis, were full of earth and yellow mustard flowers grew from between his fingers.

I'd say that the only thing worth globalizing is dissent. It's India's best export.

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

Rahel drifted into marriage like a passenger drifts towards an unoccupied chair in an airport lounge.

is it at all possible for you to prevent your washed-up cynicism from completely coloring everything?

The era of manufacturing consent has given way to the era of manufacturing news. Soon media newsrooms will drop the pretence, and start hiring theatre directors instead of journalists.

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

By the time they got back, the lights were all out and everybody was asleep. Everybody, that is, except for Guih Kyom the dung beetle. He was wide awake and on duty, lying on his back with his legs in the air to save the world in case the heavens fell.

When we speak of confronting Empire, we need to identify what Empire means. Does it mean the US government (and its European satellites), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation (WTO), and multinational corporations? Or is it something more than that?

Somewhere along the way, Capitalism reduced the idea of justice to mean just human rights, and the idea of dreaming of equality became blasphemous. We are not fighting to tinker with reforming a system that needs to be replaced.

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.