Quotes from Arundhati Roy

Morire divenne semplicemente un altro modo di vivere.

In certi paesi alcuni soldati muoiono due volte.

With a street-fighter's unerring insticts, Comrade Pillai knew that his straitened circumstances (his small, hot house, his grunting mother, his obvious proximity to the toiling masses) gave him a power over Chacko that in those revolutionary times no amount of Oxford education could match. He held his poverty like a gun to Chacko's head.

Ammu said that human beings were creatures of habit, and it was amazing the kind of things they could get used to. You only had to look around you, Ammu said, to see that the beatings with brass vases were the least of them.

Venne dichiarato il ritorno allo stato di normalità. (Lo stato di normalità era sempre una dichiarazione.)

For the first time in her life, Tilo felt that her body had enough room to accommodate all its organs.

Llovía el día en que Rahel regresó a Ayemenem. Hilos de plata inclinados se incrustaban en la blanda tierra y la levantaban como si fueran balas de fusil.

In battle, Musa told Tilo, enemies can't break your spirit, only friends can

Y el Aire estaba plagado de pensamientos y Cosas que Decir. Pero en momentos como ésos sólo se dicen Pequeñas Cosas. Las Grandes Cosas permanecen dentro, sin decirse.

Forse agli occhi di uno studioso di storia e conflitti umani è a questo che si sarebbe ridotto in realtà il piccolo corteo, visto in termini relativi: una fila di formiche che si allontanavano con qualche briciola caduta dalla tavola dei potenti.

In a determined reversal of her inherent nature, Kochu Maria now, as a policy, hardly ever believed anything that anybody said.

The slow ceiling fan sliced the thick, frightened air into an unending spiral that spun slowly to the floor like the peeled skin of an endless potato.

As she grew older, Ammu learned to live with this cold, calculating cruelty. She developed a lofty sense of injustice and the mulish, reckless streak that develops in Someone Small who has been bullied all their lives by Someone Big. She did exactly nothing to avoid quarrels and confrontations. In fact, it could be argued that she sought them out, perhaps even enjoyed them.

Who can know from the word goodbye what kind of parting is in store for us?

Caste was implied in people's names, in the way people referred to each other, in the work they did, in the clothes they wore, in the marriages that were arranged, in the language they spoke. Even so, I never encountered the notion of caste in a single school textbook. Reading Ambedkar alerted me to a gaping hole in our pedagogical universe.

stilts, the ground floors given over to parking. It's a good idea in this car-maddened city

He was grateful to her for not wanting to look after him. For not offering to tidy his room. For not being his cloying mother. He grew to depend on Margaret Kochamma for not depending on him. He adored her for not adoring him. Of

Later became a horrible, menacing, goose-bumpy word.

And she had learned from experience that Need was a warehouse that could accommodate a considerable amount of cruelty.

She grew tired of living a life that wasn't really hers at an address she oughtn't to be at. She had lost the ability to keep her discrete world discrete. The traffic inside her head seemed to have stopped believing in traffic lights.

this foggy little back lane, with its everyday humdrumness, its vulgarity, its unfortunate but tolerable inequities, its donkeys and its minor cruelties, is like a small corner of Paradise. The shops in the market sell food and flowers and clothes and mobile phones, not grenades and machine guns. Children play at ringing doorbells, not at being suicide bombers. We have our troubles, our terrible moments, yes, but these are only aberrations.

I'm Popeye the sailor man  dum dum I live in a cara-van  dum dum I op-en the door And fall-on the floor I'm Popeye the sailor man  dum dum

The complete absence of a desire to please, or to put someone at their ease, could, in a less vulnerable person, have been construed as arrogance. In her it came across as a kind of reckless aloneness.

She wondered how to un-know certain things