Quotes from Arundhati Roy

A bee died in a coffin flower.

The war against terror is not really about terror. It's about a superpower's self-destructive impulse toward supremacy, stranglehold, global hemegony.

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

He held his mundu spread above his head to dry. The wind lifted it like a sail. He was suddenly happy. Things will get worse he thought to himself. Then better. He was walking swiftly now, towards the Heart of Darkness. As lonely as a wolf. The God of Loss. The God of Small Things. Naked but for his nail varnish. (274)

Of the four things that were Possible in Human Nature, Rahel thought that Infinnate Joy sounded the saddest.

The truth is that she traveled back to Kashmir to still her troubled heart, and to atone for a crime she hadn't committed.

Funding as fragmented solidarity in ways that repression never could.

Globalization means standardization. The very rich and the very poor must want the same things, but only the rich can have them.

Quand par hasard elle changeait de chaîne, toutes ces famines, ces épidémies, ces guerres télévisuelles l'affolaient. (...) Elle considérait famines, génocides et purifications ethniques comme autant de phénomènes susceptibles de mettre son mobilier en péril.

A war that we have won and lost. The very worst sort of war. A war that captures dreams and re-dreams them. A war that has made us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.

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

Something lay buried in the ground. Under grass. Under twenty-three years of June rain. A small forgotten thing. Nothing that the world would miss. A child's plastic wristwatch with the time painted on it. Ten to two, it said.

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.

The infinite tenderness of motherhood and the reckless rage of a suicide bomber. It was this that grew inside her, and eventually led her to love by night the man her children loved

In an unconscious gesture of television-enforced democracy

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.

Slowly, over the years, Estha withdrew from the world. He grew accustomed to the uneasy octopus that lived inside him and squirted its inky tranquilizer on his past. Gradually the reason for his silence was hidden away, entombed somewhere deep in the soothing folds of the fact of it.

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.

He began to look wiser than he really was. Like a fisherman in a city. With sea-secrets in him

Sabes lo que ocurre cuando haces daño a la gente? Dijo Ammu. Cuando dañas a la gente, comienzan a quererte menos. Eso es lo que hacen las palabras descuidadas. Hacen que la gente te quiera un poco menos.

She wasn't beautiful in the way Bombay Silk was, but she was sexier, more intriguing, handsome in the way some women can be.

Sitting between the two professors, I enjoyed their contradictory advice. I sat there smiling, thinking of the first message I received from John Berger. It was a beautiful handwritten letter, from a writer who had been my hero for years: 'Your fiction and nonfiction—they walk you around the world like your two legs.' That settled it for me.

White-walled once. Red-roofed. But painted in weather-colors now. With brushes dipped in nature's palette. Mossgreen. Earth-brown. Crumbleblack

Un, kad m?s skat?mies pa logu, tad redzam tikai ?nas. Ka m??in?m ieklaus?ties, m?s dzirdam tikai ?ukstus. M?s nevaram saprast ?ukstus, jo m?su pr?tos ir iebrucis karš. Karš, kur? m?s esam uzvar?juši un zaud?juši Pats slikt?kais karš. Karš, kas sag?sta sap?us un tos p?rsap?o par jaunu. Karš, kas licis mums piel?gt m?su iekarot?jus un nicin?t pašiem sevi.