Quotes from Arundhati Roy

This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt.

Change is one thing. Acceptance is another.

The way her body existed only where he touched her. The rest of her was smoke.

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.

He folded his fear into a perfect rose. He held it out in the palm of his hand. She took it from him and put it in her hair.

When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.

There is a war that makes us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.

There's really no such thing as the 'voiceless'. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.

I am completely a loner. In my head I want to feel I can be anywhere. There is a sort of recklessness that being a loner allows me.

It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain. To let it be, to travel with it, as Velutha did, is much the harder thing to do.

Ammu said that human beings were creatures of habit, and it was amazing the kind of things one could get used to.

If he touched her, he couldn't talk to her, if he loved her he couldn't leave, if he spoke he couldn't listen, if he fought he couldn't win.

Things can change in a day.

Some things come with their own punishments.

The American way of life is not sustainable. It doesn't acknowledge that there is a world beyond America.

As Estha stirred the thick jam he thought Two Thoughts and the Two Thoughts he thought were these: a) Anything can happen to anyone. and b) It is best to be prepared.

Colorful demonstrations and weekend marches are vital but alone are not powerful enough to stop wars. Wars will be stopped only when soldiers refuse to fight, when workers refuse to load weapons onto ships and aircraft, when people boycott the economic outposts of Empire that are strung across the globe.

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

Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she came from poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace Worse Things kept happening

All my books are accidental books - they come from reacting to things and thinking about things and engaging in a real way. They are not about, 'Oh, did it get a good review in the Guardian?' I don't care.

If you ask me what is at the core of what I write, it isn't about 'rights', it's about justice. Justice is a grand, beautiful, revolutionary idea.

India lives in several centuries at the same time.

I think one of the saddest things that's happening to literature is that it's getting over-simplified by this diet of simple political ideas.

Democracy no longer means what it was meant to. It has been taken back into the workshop. Each of its institutions has been hollowed out, and it has been returned to us as a vehicle for the free market, of the corporations. For the corporations, by the corporations.