Quotes from Arundhati Roy

They only asked for punishments that fitted their crimes. Not ones that came like cupboards with built-in bedrooms. Not ones you spent your whole life in, wandering through its maze of shelves.

To call someone 'anti-American', indeed, to be anti-American, is not just racist, it's a failure of the imagination.

When you recreate the image of man, why repeat God's mistakes?

The TV channels never ran out of sponsorship for their live telecasts of despair. They never ran out of despair

Neither question nor answer was meant as anything more than a polite preamble to conversation.

Some days he walked along the banks of the river that smelled of shit and pesticides bought with World Bank loans.

Never counted in the costs of war are the dead birds, the charred animals the murdered fish, incinerated insects, poisoned water sources, destroyed vegetation. Rarely mentioned is the arrogance of the human race toward other living things with which it shares this planet. All these are forgotten in the fight for markets and ideologies. This arrogance will probably be the ultimate undoing of the human species.

Trees raised their naked, mottled branches to the sky like mourners stilled in attitudes of grief.

He was a candid man, the SP: 'See, ma'am, frankly speaking this problem can't be solved by us police or military. The problem with these tribals is they don't understand greed. Unless they become greedy there's no hope for us. I have told my boss, remove the force and instead put a TV in every home. Everything will be automatically sorted out.

Destroying us. You are constructing us. It's yourselves that you are destroying.

She knew very well that she knew very well that she knew very well.

Dear Doctor, If you like you can change every inch of me. I'm just a story.

Her collarbones like wings that spread from the base of her throat to the ends of her shoulders. A bird held down by skin.

It was a grand old house, the Ayemenem House, but aloof-looking. As though it had little to do with the people who lived in it. Like an old man with rheumy eyes watching children play, seeing only transience in their shrill elation and their whole-hearted commitment to life.

Margaret Kochamma's tiny, ordered life relinquished itself to this truly baroque bedlam with the quiet gasp of a warm body entering a chilly sea.

As for the third Official Reason: exposing Western Hypocrisy - how much more exposed can they be? Which decent human being on earth harbors any illusions about it? These are people whose histories are spongy with the blood of others. Colonialism, apartheid, slavery, ethnic cleansing, germ warfare, chemical weapons - they virtually invented it all.

It was herself she was exhausted by. She had lost the ability to keep her discrete worlds discrete—a skill that many consider to be the cornerstone of sanity. The traffic inside her head seemed to have stopped believing in traffic lights. The result was incessant noise, a few bad crashes and eventually gridlock.

But eventually, the Elixir of the Soul that had survived wars and the bloody birth of three new countries, was, like most things in the world, trumped by Coca-Cola.

If you're happy in a dream…does that count? The happiness–does it count?

The sky was thick with TV. If you wore special glasses you could see them spinning through the sky among the bats and homing birds—blondes, wars, famines, football, food shows, coups d'état, hairstyles stiff with hair spray. Designer pectorals. Gliding towards Ayemenem like skydivers. Making patterns in the sky. Wheels. Windmills. Flowers blooming and unblooming.

Chacko had been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and was permitted excesses and eccentricities nobody else was. He claimed to be writing a Family Biography that the Family would have to pay him not to publish. Ammu said that there was only one person in the family who was a fit candidate for biographical blackmail and that was Chacko himself.

When the twins asked what cuff-links were for—"To link cuffs together," Ammu told them—they were thrilled by this morsel of logic in what had so far seemed an illogical language. Cuff + link = cuff-link . This, to them, rivaled the precision of logic and mathematics. Cuff-links gave them an inordinate (if exaggerated) satisfaction, and a real affection for the English language.

Was it possible to live outside language? Naturally this question did not address itself to her in words, or as a single lucid sentence. It addressed itself to her as a soundless, embryonic howl.

But can we, should we, let apprehensions about the future immobilize us in the present?