Arundhati Roy Quotes

Capitalism is destroying the planet. The two old tricks that dug it out of past crises--War and Shop...

And a strange, deadly war is raging around the world. Yet, each person who has lost a loved one sure...

To fuel yet another war this time against Iraq by cynically manipulating people's grief, by packagin...

In effect, terrorists now have the power to ignite war. They almost have their finger on the nuclear...

The English-language press in India supports the project of corporate globalization fully. It has no...

Sitting next to Tilo, breathing next to her, he felt like an empty house whose locked windows and do...

We ought not to speak only about the economics of globalization, but about the psychology of globali...

People often don't understand the engine that drives corruption. Particularly in India, they assume ...

Globalization means standardization. The very rich and the very poor must want the same things, but ...

Isn't there a flaw in the logic of that phrase - speak truth to power? It assumes that power doesn't...

DB: There's a lot of talk about terrorism. In fact, it's become almost an obsession for the media in...

When you live in the United States, with the roar of the free market, the roar of this huge military...

I think it is dangerous to confuse the idea of democracy with elections. Just because you have elect...

I'm not talking about being against development. I'm talking about the politics of development. I'm ...

If you think of the world as a global village, a fight between India and Pakistan is like a fight be...

The policies the US government is following are dangerous for its citizens. It's true that you can b...

We hear all this talk about integrating the world economically, but there is an argument to be made ...

I see a role for specialized knowledge, but I think that it's important for there to be an arena whe...

It isn't a coincidence that the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat happened after September 11. Gujarat ...

As for the third Official Reason: exposing Western Hypocrisy - how much more exposed can they be? Wh...

Power is fortified not just by what it destroys, but also by what it creates. Not just by what it ta...

At times there's something so precise and mathematically chilling about nationalism.Build a dam to t...

[Internationa] Aid is just another praetorian business enterprise.

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

To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable ...

How can you measure progress if you don't know what it costs and who has paid for it? How can the "m...

From now on it is not dying we must fear, but living.

It is such a supreme folly to believe that nuclear weapons are deadly only if they're used. The fact...

The war for the Narmada valley is not just some exotic tribal war, or a remote rural war or even an ...

The steel door of the incinerator went up and the muted hum of the eternal fire became a red roaring...

Perhaps it’s true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of ...

She wore flowers in her hair and carried magic secrets in her eyes. She spoke to no one. She spent h...

It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dre...

But when they made love he was offended by her eyes. They behaved as though they belonged to someone...

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

Suddenly Ammu hoped that it had been him that Rahel saw him in the march. She hoped it had been him ...

There are things that can be forgotten. And things that cannot - that sit on dusty shelves like stuf...

To understand history,' Chacko said, 'we have to go inside and listen to what they're saying. And lo...

Only that once again they broke the Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved. And how. And how m...

When she listened to songs that she loved on the radio, something stirred inside her. A liquid ache ...

NGOs have a complicated space in neoliberal politics. They are supposed to mop up the anger. Even wh...

When, as happened recently in France, an attempt is made to coerce women out of the burqa rather tha...

You begin to realize that hypocrisy is not a terrible thing when you see what overt fascism is compa...

Either way, change will come. It could be bloody, or it could be beautiful. It depends on us.

I think one of the saddest things that's happening to literature is that it's getting over-simplifie...

Everyone thinks I live alone, but I don't. My characters all live with me.

In India we're fighting to retain a wilderness that we have. Whereas in the west, it's gone. Every p...

It was raining when Rahel came back to Ayemenem. Slanting silver ropes slammed into loose earth, plo...

Heaven opened and the water hammered down, reviving the reluctant old well, greenmossing the pigless...

Flat muscled and honey coloured. Sea secrets in his eyes. A silver raindrop in his ear.

Even in the most uneventful of our lives, we are called upon to choose our battles...

But what was there to say?Only that there were tears. Only that Quietness and Emptiness fitted toget...

His gratitude widened his smile and bent his back.

They looked at each other. They weren't thinking anymore. The time for that had come and gone. Smash...

How history negotiates its terms and collects its dues from those who break its laws.

The twins were too young to know that these were only history’s henchmen. Sent to square the books a...

That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.

Certainly no beast has essayed the boundless, infinitely inventive art of human hatred. No beast can...

If you're happy in a dream, does that count?

And once again, only the Small Things were said. The Big Things lurked unsaid inside.

Their lives have a size and a shape now. Estha has his and Rahel hers.Edges, Borders, Boundaries, Br...

Glanced up and caught Ammu's gaze. Centuries telescoped into one evanescent moment. History was wron...

It turned out to be a war which, unfortunately for Comrade Pillai, would end almost before it began....

Ammu's tears made everything that had so far seemed unreal, real.

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

The two men had a conversation. Brief, cryptic, to the point. As though they had exchanged numbers a...

They sensed somehow that she lived in the prenumbral shadows between two worlds, just beyond the gra...

They visited him in saris, clumping gracelessly through red mud and long grass ... and introduced th...

He could do only one thing at a time. If he held her, he couldn't kiss her. If he kissed her, he cou...

Ridges of muscle on his stomach rose under his skin like divisions on a slab of chocolate. He held h...

She discovered that underneath the aspect of the Rumpled Porcupine, a tortured Marxist was at war wi...

They only asked for punishments that fitted their crimes. Not ones that came like cupboards with bui...

It wasn't what lay at the end of her road that frightened Ammu as much as the nature of the road its...

Her collarbones like wings that spread from the base of her throat to the ends of her shoulders. A b...

Then to give the kids a historical perspective, Chacko told them about the earth woman. He made them...

She was perhaps too young to realize that what she assumed was her love for [him] was actually a ten...

Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons I do not fully u...

At least not until the Terror took hold of him. Not until he saw, night after night, a little boat b...

Life went on. Death went on. The war went on.

She could hear her hair growing. It sounded like something crumbling. A burnt thing crumbling. Coal....

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

She thought of the city at night, of cities at night. Discarded constellations of old stars, fallen ...

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

Normalcy was declared. (Normalcy was always a declaration.)

Enemies can't break your spirit, only friends can.

The moment I saw her, a part of me walked out of my body and wrapped itself around her. And there it...

Socrates asked the key question: why should we be moral?

Something about Tilo’s new home reminded Musa of the story of Mumtaz Afzal Malik, the young taxi dri...

There seems to be no hope. But pretending to be hopeful is the only grace we have . . .

N O T H I N GI would like to write one of those sophisticated stories in which even though nothing m...

Cow, goat, chicken, lamb . . . only slaves eat like this,’ Musa said, heaping an impolite amount on ...

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

In the last photograph of her, the bullet wound looked like a cheerful summer rose arranged just abo...

But Tilo had crept up on him, and become a kind of compulsion, an addiction almost. Addiction has it...

The frozen flowers never go away. They hang around somewhere all the time. I think we need to talk ab...

History would be a revelation of the future as much as it was a study of the past.

The story flared, then faded.

History is really a study of the future, not the past.

We're told, often enough, that as a species we are poised on the edge of the abyss. It's possible th...

Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen....

Any government's condemnation of terrorism is only credible if it shows itself to be responsive to p...