Quotes from Arundhati Roy

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.

We're Prisoners of War," Chacko said. "Our dreams have been doctored. We belong nowhere. We sail unanchored on troubled seas. We may never be allowed ashore. Our sorrows will never be sad enough. Our joys never happy enough. Our dreams never big enough. Our lives never important enough. To matter.

Who was he mourning? She didn't know. A whole generation maybe.

In the end it didn't matter of course.

I am weary of worldly gatherings, O Lord What pleasure in them, when the light in my heart is gone? From the clamor of crowds I flee, my heart seeks The kind of silence that would mesmerize speech itself

In the year she knew him, before they were married, she discovered a little magic in herself, and for a while felt like a blithe genie released from a lamp. She was perhaps too young to realize that what she assumed was her love for Chacko was actually a tentative, timorous, acceptance of herself.

They had always fitted together like pieces of an unsolved (and perhaps unsolvable) puzzle

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.

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.

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.

What Larry McCaslin saw in Rahel's eyes was not despair at all, but a sort of enforced optimism. And a hollow where Estha's words' had been. He couldn't be expected to understand that. That the emptiness in one twin was only a version of the quietness in the other. That the two things fitted together. Like stacked spoons. Like familiar lovers' bodies.

Marxism was a simple substitute for Christianity. Replace God with Marx, Satan with the bourgeoisie, Heaven with a classless society, the Church with the Party

The Marxists worked from within the communal divides, never challenging them, never appearing not to. They offered a cocktail revolution. A heady mix of Eastern Marxism and orthodox Hinduism, spiked with a shot of democracy.

She remembered reading somewhere that even after people died, their hair and nails kept growing. Like starlight, traveling 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. 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.

He broke the eggs but burned the omelette.

A few months later Miss Mitten was killed by a milk van in Hobart, across the road from a cricket oval. To the twins there was hidden justice in the fact that the milk van had been reversing.

The doors had not two, but four shutters of paneled teak so that in the old days, ladies could keep the bottom half closed, lean their elbows on the ledge and bargain with visiting vendors without betraying themselves below the waist. Technically, they could buy carpets, or bangles, with their breasts covered and their bottoms bare. Technically.

there were only three kinds of people in this city – security guards, people who need security guards, and thieves.

She said, "I'm not marrying anybody." When I asked her why she felt that way, she said she wanted to be free to die irresponsibly, without notice and for no reason.

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

Once you have fallen off the edge like all of us have, including our Biroo," Anjum said, "you will never stop falling. And as you fall you will hold on to other falling people. The sooner you understand that the better. This place where we live, where we have made our home, is the place of falling people. Here there is no haqeeqat. Arre, even we aren't real. We don't really exist.

It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that it purloined. Over

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.

If you're happy in a dream, does that count? The happiness - does it count?