Quotes from Arundhati Roy

In remote border areas, near the Line of Control, the speed and regularity with which the bodies turned up, and the condition some of them were in, wasn't easy to cope with. Some were delivered in sacks, some in small polythene bags, just pieces of flesh, some hair and teeth. Notes pinned to them by the quartermasters of death said: 1kg, 27 kg, 500 g.

Gandhi actually said everything and it's opposite. To cherry pickers, he offers such a bewildering variety of cherries that you have to wonder if there was something the matter with the tree.

She was perhaps too young to realize that what she assumed was her love for Chacko was actually a tentative, timorous, acceptance of herself.

Childhood tiptoed out. Silence slid in like a bolt.

And we cannot understand the whispering, because our minds have been invaded by a war. 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.

You're the Imam Sahib, not me. Where do old birds go to die? Do they fall on us like stones from the sky? Do we stumble on their bodies in the streets? Do you not think that the All-Seeing, Almighty One who put us on this Earth has made proper arrangements to take us away?

Like an old man with rheumy eyes watching children play, seeing only transience in their shrill elation and their wholehearted commitment to life.

She was buried right next to her mother, Begum Arifa Yeswi. Mother and daughter died by the same bullet. It entered Miss Jebeen's head through her left temple and came to rest in her mother's heart. In the last photograph of her, the bullet wound looked like a cheerful summer rose arranged just above her left ear. A few petals had fallen on her kaffan, the white shroud she was wrapped in before she was laid to rest.

You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don't. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won't. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn't. And yet you want to know again.

Rahel? pasimok?. Džiaugsmas visada baigiasi ašaromis.

He folded his fear into a perfect rose... She took it from him, and put it in her hair.

Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story.

In the evenings, when he knew visitors were expected, he would sit on the verandah and sew buttons that weren't missing onto his shirts, to create the impression that Mammachi neglected him. To some small degree he did succeed in farther corroding Ayemenem's view of working wives.

According to Estha, if they'd been born on the bus, they'd have got free bus rides for the rest of their lives. It wasn't clear where he'd got this information from, or how he knew these things, but for years the twins harbored a faint resentment against their parents for having diddled them out of a lifetime of free bus rides.

There's so much data, but no one really wants to know anything, don't you think?

Levantó la mirada. Y vio que Chacko había desaparecido y en su lugar había un monstruo.

the connection between GDP growth and jobs is a myth.

Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story.

proposes Nazi-style purges of Indian Muslims.

I'm not ambitious. I don't want to get anywhere, I don't want anything more. I sometimes think that for me that is the real freedom, that I don't want anything. I don't want money or prizes. I want people to know that a war is going to be fought.

growth," 60 percent of India's workforce is self-employed, and 90 percent of India's labor force works in the unorganized sector.11

The moment a breath enters the body, it becomes political.

Career. Desire. Dream. Poetry. Love. Youth itself. Dying became just another way of living.

Her face was pale and as wrinkled as a dhobi's thumb from being in water for too long.