Quotes from Arundhati Roy

Something convulsed. Something changed. It was about language again. Not a writer's private language, but a country's public language, its public imagination of itself. Suddenly, things that would have been unthinkable to say in public became acceptable. Officially acceptable. Virile national pride, which had more to do with hate than love, flowed like noxious lava on the streets.

Centuries telescoped into one evanescent moment. History was wrong-footed, caught off guard. Sloughed off like an old snakeskin. Its marks, its scars, its wounds from old wars and the walking backwards days all fell away. In its absence it left an aura, a palpable shimmering that was as plain to see as the water in a river or the sun in the sky. As plain to feel as the heat on a hot day, or the tug of a fish on a taut line. So obvious that no one noticed.

They denounced him for his "Parliamentary Cretinism" and accused him of "providing relief to the people and thereby blunting the People's Consciousness and diverting them from the Revolution.

In some countries, some soldiers die twice

And they would not believe me precisely because they would know that what I said was true.

Jis sar ko ghurur aaj hai yaan taj-vari ka Kal uss pe yahin shor hai phir nauhagari ka

Since his idea of professional integrity requires him to live by his principles, in order to remain a person of integrity, he has changed his principles, and now believes in us almost more than we believe in ourselves.

The only dream worth having, I told her, is to dream that you will live while you're alive and die only when you're dead.

I mean, it's all a matter of your heart . . . NÂZIM HIKMET

Father Mulligan's death did not alter the text of the entries in Baby Kochamma's diary, simply because as far as she was concerned it did not alter his availability. If anything, she possessed him in death in a way that she never had while he was alive. At least her memory of him was hers. Wholly hers. Savagely, fiercely, hers. Not to be shared with Faith, far less with competing co-nuns

He could feel the tremor, the motor under her skin. Still, of all the women in the world, to have this woman's hand in his made him indescribably happy.

In Orissa, where it is mining bauxite, Vedanta is financing a university. In these creeping, innocuous ways mining corporations enter our imaginations: the Gentle Giants Who Really Care. It's called CSR, corporate social responsibility.

His mind was full of cupboards, cluttered with secret pleasures.

How to tell a shattered story? By slowly becoming everybody. No. By slowly becoming everything.

Normality in our part of the world is a bit like a boiled egg: its humdrum surface conceals at its heart a yolk of egregious violence.

Those eyes that stared at us for one and a half hours – they were forgiving eyes, understanding eyes. We Kashmiris do not need to speak to each other any more in order to understand each other. We do terrible things to each other, we wound and betray and kill each other, but we understand each other.

Over coffee Mr. Hollick proposed that Babà go away for a while. For a holiday. To a clinic perhaps, for treatment. For as long as it took him to get better. And for the period of time that he was away, Mr. Hollick suggested that Ammu be sent to his bungalow to be "looked after.

She died in her cage, the little bird These words she left for her captor Please take the spring harvest And shove it up your gilded arse

They left: Six princes, their pockets stuffed with toys. A pair of two-egg twins. And the God of Loss. He couldn't walk. So they dragged him. Nobody saw them. Bats, of course, are blind.

We have journeyed to a place from which it looks unlikely that we can return, at least not without some kind of serious rupture with the past - social, political, economic and ideological.

When his bouts of violence began to include the

children, and the war with Pakistan began, Ammu left her husband and returned, unwelcomed, to her parents in Ayemenem.

they understood each other perfectly. They were both men whom childhood had abandoned without a trace. Men without curiosity. Without doubt. Both in their own way truly, terrifyingly adult. They looked out at the world and never wondered how it worked, because they knew. They worked it. They were mechanics who serviced different parts of the same machine.

He addressed Anjum without looking at her: "Do you have police permission to be here? Everybody must have permission to be here." She towered over him. His refusal to meet her eye meant he was squarely addressing her breasts.