Quotes from Arundhati Roy

The moment passed in a heartbeat. But it did not matter. What mattered was that it existed. To be present in history, even as nothing more than a chuckle, was a universe away from being absent from it, from being written out of it altogether. A chuckle, after all, could become a foothold in the sheer wall of the future.

Death was everywhere. Death was everything. Career. Desire. Dream. Poetry. Love. Youth itself. Dying became just another way of living.

Perhaps Ammu, Estha and she were the worst transgressors. But it wasn't just them. It was the others too. They all broke the rules. They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much.

There was no tour guide on hand to tell her that in Kashmir nightmares were promiscuous. That they were unfaithful to their owners, they cartwheeled wantonly into other people's dreams, they acknowledged no precincts, they were the greatest ambush artists of all. No fortification, no fence-building could keep them in check. In Kashmir the only thing to do with nightmares was to embrace them like old friends and manage them like old enemies.

the fact that she had permitted herself to be so painstakingly decorated before being led to the gallows. It seemed so absurd. So futile. Like polishing firewood.

And now, resorting to the same old scare tactics, the same tired falsehoods and the same old fake news about nuclear weapons, it is gearing up to bomb Iran. That will be the biggest mistake it has ever made.

The grass looked wetgreen and pleased. Happy earthworms frolicked purple in the slush. Green nettles nodded. Trees bent.

Addiction has its own mnemonics – skin, smell, the length of the loved one's fingers.

They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much.

So they went ahead and plugged their smelly paradise— God's Own Country they called it in their brochures—because they knew, those clever Hotel People, that smelliness, like other peoples' poverty, was merely a matter of getting used to. A question of discipline. Of Rigor and Air-conditioning. Nothing more.

There's a lot of money in poverty, and a few Nobel Prizes too.

At the time I was being celebrated for having made 'India' (whatever that means) proud. It was an odd place to be in, because I wasn't feeling at all proud of India or what was going on here.

Blue-lipped and dinner-plate-eyed, they watched, mesmerized by something that they sensed but didn't understand: the absence of caprice in what the policemen did. The abyss where anger should have been. The sober, steady brutality, the economy of it all.

Naga married Tilo because he was never really able to reach her. And because he couldn't reach her he couldn't let her go.

For all her stunning looks, she was a brutal interrogator who often exceeded her brief because she was exorcizing demons of her own.

Everybody in the U.S... should force their country... please, don't, do this. [re Iran]

Impelled by feelings that were primal yet paradoxically wholly impersonal. Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear—civilization's fear of nature, men's fear of women, power's fear of powerlessness.

The moth on Rahel's heart lifted a downy leg. Then put it back. Its little leg was cold. A little less her mother loved her.

What Esthappen and Rahel witnessed that morning, though they didn't know it then, was a clinical demonstration in controlled conditions (this was not war after all, or genocide) of human nature's pursuit of ascendancy. Structure. Order. Complete monopoly. It was human history, masquerading as God's Purpose, revealing herself to an under-age audience.

Death was everywhere. Death was everything. Career. Desire. Dream. Poetry. Love. Youth itself. Dying became just another way of living. Graveyards sprang up in parks and meadows, by streams and rivers, in fields and forest glades. Tombstones grew out of the ground like young children's teeth. Every village, every locality, had its own graveyard.

De repente, los comunistas se encontraron en la extraordinaria posición, que los críticos calificaron de absurda, de tener que gobernar a un pueblo y al mismo tiempo fomentar la revolución.

There are people who have comfortable relationships with power and people with natural antagonism to power. I think it's easy to guess where I am in that.

There can be nothing more humiliating for a writer of fiction to have to do than restate a case that has already been made.

Torture has been privatized now, so you have obviously the whole scandal in America about the abuse of prisoners and the fact that, army people might be made to pay a price, but who are the privatized torturers accountable too?