Quotes from Arundhati Roy

their English aunt, Margaret Kochamma—and their cousin, Sophie Mol, who were coming from London to spend Christmas at Ayemenem.

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

Eszta fejében addig volt csend, amíg Ráhel meg nem érkezett. De a lány magával hozta az elrobogó vonatok hangját, és azt a fényt meg árnyékot, mely akkor éri az embert, ha az ablak mellett ül.

Even later, on the thirteen nights that followed this one, instinctively they stuck to the Small Things. The Big Things ever lurked inside. They knew that there was nowhere for them to go. They had nothing. No future. So they stuck to the small things.

They pulled off his turban, tore out his beard and necklaced him South Africa-style with a burning tyre while people stood around baying their encouragement.

Sometimes it seems very much as though those who have a radical vision for a newer, better world do not have the steel it takes to resist the military onslaught, and those who have the steel do not have the vision.

Every tie a pye-dog strayed onto the road, the driver made a sincere effort to kill it. (108)

A quiet bubble floating on a sea of noise.

India was a Free Country. You could make salt. Row jam, if you wanted to.

At on level I am happy--awed--that there are people...that have defected from the state...but then there's part of me that thinks... How could you ever have believed in it? Is is possible to have a moral state? A moral superpower? I can't understand those people that believe the excesses are just aberrations ... Of course I understand it intellectually, but ... part of me wants to retain that incomprehension ...

The God of Loss. The God of Small Things. He left no footprints in sand, no ripples in water, no image in mirrors.

To fuel yet another war this time against Iraq by cynically manipulating people's grief, by packaging it for TV specials sponsored by corporations selling detergent and running shoes, is to cheapen and devalue grief, to drain it of meaning. What we are seeing now is a vulgar display of the business of grief, the commerce of grief, the pillaging of even the most private human feelings for political purpose. It is a terrible, violent thing for a State to do to its people.

Her tolerance of "Men's Needs," as far as her son was concerned, became the fuel for her unmanageable fury at her daughter.

You may be right after all, I said to him in the kitchen. You may be right, but you'll never win. I think the opposite, he smiled, stirring the pot from which a wonderful aroma of rogan josh arose. We may turn out to be wrong, but we have already won.

Although she missed the singing by the children from the school opposite her apartment, she didn't teach her own pupils to sing 'We Shall Overcome' in any language, because she wasn't sure that Overcoming was anywhere on anyone's horizon.

Everybody watched. Nobody stopped them.

What we need are people who are prepared to be unpopular. Who are prepared to put themselves in danger. Who are prepared to tell the truth. Brave journalists can do that, and they have. Brave lawyers can do that, and they have. And artists—beautiful, brilliant, brave writers, poets, musicians, painters, and filmmakers can do that. That beauty is on our side. All of it.

Amit mindenütt látunk, az a faj problémája. Egyikünk sem mentes tÅ'le. Aztán ott az a másik üzlet, ami elég elterjedt manapság. Emberek - közösségek, kasztok, fajták, sÅ't országok is - trófeaként hurcolják körbe tragikus történelmüket meg a balsorsukat, vagy mint a részvényt, hogy adják-vegyék a szabadpiacon.

what she assumed was her love for Chacko was actually a tentative, timorous, acceptance of herself.

Thousands of years of ideological, philosophical, and practical decisions were made. They altered the surface of the earth, the coordinates of our souls. For every one of those decisions, maybe there's another decision that could have been made, should have been made.

He longed for the river. Because water always helps.

A dor dela própria a entristecia. A dele a devastava.

E aveva imparato per esperienza che il Bisogno è un magazzino in cui si possono accumulare considerevoli scorte di crudeltà.

You can see them from your car window when you drive home every night. Try not to look away. Try to meet their eyes.