Welcome to our collection of quotes by Arundhati Roy. We hope you enjoy pondering them and please share widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Arundhati Roy
Suzanna Arundhati Roy (born 24 November 1961) is an Indian author best known for her novel The God of Small Things (1997), which won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 1997 and became the best-selling book by a non-expatriate Indian author. She is also a political activist involved in human rights and environmental causes.
To call someone like me a writer-activist suggests that it's not the job of a writer to write about the society in which they live. But it used to be our job.
When I decided to write 'The God of Small Things', I had been working in cinema. It was almost a decision to downshift from there. I thought that 300 people would read it. But it created a platform of trust.
There are things that can be forgotten. And things that cannot -- that sit on dusty shelves like stuffed birds with baleful, sideways staring eyes.
She wore flowers in her hair and carried magic secrets in her eyes.
Longer Version:
She wore flowers in her hair and carried magic secrets in her eyes. She spoke to no one. She spent hours on the riverbank. She smoked cigarettes and had midnight swims.
Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things.
Longer Version:
Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things. And here we are with our crash helmets on, with concertina wire all around us.
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.
I have nothing against romance. I believe that we must hold on to the right to dream and to be romantic. But an Indian village is not something that I would romanticize that easily.
I never, ever decided that I had to write a novel because, to me, there's no such decision that ought to be made. It's only something that I felt compelled to do, and it began to evolve.
Everyone thinks I live alone, but I don't. My characters all live with me.
Longer Version:
Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness -- and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we're being brainwashed to believe.
The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling -- their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.
Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.
Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.
While, legally and constitutionally, speech may be free, the space in which that freedom can be exercised has been snatched from us and auctioned to the highest bidders.
You may be right after all, I said to him in the kitchen. You may be right, but you'll never win.
I think the opposite, he smiled, stirring the pot from which a wonderful aroma of rogan josh arose. We may turn out to be wrong, but we have already won.
If you'll pardon me for making this somewhat prosaic observation -- maybe that's what life is, or ends up being most of the time: a rehearsal for a performance that never eventually materializes.
To call someone 'anti-American', indeed, to be anti-American, is not just racist, it's a failure of the imagination.
Certainly no beast has essayed the boundless, infinitely inventive art of human hatred. No beast can match its range and power.
Either way, change will come. It could be bloody, or it could be beautiful. It depends on us.
And once again, only the Small Things were said. The Big Things lurked unsaid inside. (165).
Trees raised their naked, mottled branches to the sky like mourners stilled in attitudes of grief.
When the last soldier has gone, the people climb over the debris of the burnt house. The tin sheets that were once the roof are still smouldering. A scorched trunk lies open, flames still leaping out of it. What was in it that burns so beautifully?
The practice of untouchability, cruel as it was- the broom tied to the waist, the pot hung around the neck- was the performative, ritualistic end of the practice of caste. The real violence of the caste was the denial of entitlement: to land, to wealth, to knowledge, to equal opportunity.
Today, we seem to be striving towards injustice, applauding it as though it's a worthy dream, made sacred by the caste system.
There is a war that makes us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.
Capitalism is destroying the planet. The two old tricks that dug it out of past crises -- War and Shopping -- simply will not work.
Do we need weapons to fight wars? Or do we need wars to create markets for weapons?
The era of manufacturing consent has given way to the era of manufacturing news. Soon media newsrooms will drop the pretence, and start hiring theatre directors instead of journalists.
I really worry about these political people that have no personal life. If there's nothing that's lovely, and if there's nothing that's just ephemeral, that you can just lie on the floor and bust a gut laughing at, then what's the point?
Because of who I am and what place I have now in India, I'm petitioned all the time to get involved. It's exhausting and very difficult to have to say, 'Look, I'm only one person. I can't do everything.' I know that I don't want to be worn to the bone where I lose my sense of humor.
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.
Globalization means standardization. The very rich and the very poor must want the same things, but only the rich can have them.
In India, whichever language you write in, the possibility of people not understanding irony or not understanding remains there. This as a writer is most terrifying!
Fiction is truth. I think fiction is the truest thing there ever was. My whole effort is to remove that distinction. The writer is the midwife of understanding. It's very important for me to tell politics like a story, to make it real.
We need a new kind of politics. Not the politics of governance, but the politics of resistance. The politics of opposition. The politics of joining hands across the world and preventing certain destruction.
She sensed that in some strange tangential way, he needed her shade as much as she needed his. And she had learned from experience that Need was a warehouse that could accommodate a considerable amount of cruelty.
She woke to the sound of his heart knocking against his chest. As though it was searching for a way out.
My writing is translated into every Indian language, it's distributed in pamphlets, in little private video things, it's everywhere. So it's a lovely pastime for the middle class to think of itself as the whole nation.
It was not entirely his fault that he lived in a society where a man's death could be more profitable than his life had ever been.
Smells, like music, hold memories. She breathed deep, and bottled it up for posterity.
Only that once again they broke the Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much.
There can be nothing more humiliating for a writer of fiction to have to do than restate a case that has already been made.
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.
America is like some crazed, bewildered, rich giant bumbling around in a poor area with his pockets stuffed with money, and lots of weapons -- just throwing stuff around.
Non-violence should be a tactic -- not an ideology preached from the sidelines to victims of massive violence.
To me, there is nothing higher than fiction. Nothing. It is fundamentally who I am. I am a teller of stories. For me, that's the only way I can make sense of the world, with all the dance that it involves.
As I keep saying, fiction is truth. I think fiction is the truest thing there ever was.
They were strangers who had met in a chance encounter.
They had known each other before Life began. (310).
It had been quiet in Estha's head until Rahel came. But with her she had brought the sound of passing trains, and the light and shade that falls on you if you have a window seat.
Dams are the temples of secular India and almost worshipped. They are huge, wet cement flags that wave in our minds. They're the symbol of nationalism to many.
Election campaigns seem to siphon away political anger and even basic political intelligence into this great vaudeville, after which we all end up in exactly the same place.
Stable markets, unstable world. Efficiency. Everybody hears about it. It's enough to make you want to be pro-inefficiency and pro-corruption.
In the last photograph of her, the bullet wound looked like a cheerful summer rose arranged just above her left ear. A few petals had fallen on her kaffan, the white shroud she was wrapped in before she was laid to rest.
As a writer, I have to go to a different place now. As a person... I want to step off whatever this stage is that I have been given. The argument has been made, the battle remains to be fought -- and that requires a different set of skills.
For many people, the family is portrayed as the settled place of reasonable safety, but as anyone who has read 'The God of Small Things' would know, for me it was a dangerous place. I felt humiliated in that space. I wanted to get away as soon as I could.
The only good thing about nuclear war is that it is the single most egalitarian idea that man has ever had. On the day of reckoning, you will not be asked to present your credentials. The devastation will be indiscriminate.
Being with him made her feel as though her soul had escaped from the narrow confines of her island country into the vast, extravagant spaces of his. He made her feel as though the world belonged to them- as though it lay before them like an opened frog on a dissecting table, begging to be examined.
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.
I don't have the Big Idea. I don't have the arrogance to even want to have the Big Idea. But I believe the physics of resisting power is as old as the physics of accumulating power. That's what keeps the balance in the universe... the refusal to obey.
Mamachi tried to caution Chacko. He heard her out, but didn't really listen to what she was saying. So despite the early rumblings of discontent on the premises of Paradise Pickles, Chacko, in rehearsal for the Revolucion, continued to play Conrade! Comrade! (116).
I'm a social cripple in a cocktail party. My idea of a nightmare is people standing very elegantly dressed in a room with a drink in their hand. I'm just like, 'Urghh!'
Public support in the U.S. for the war against Iraq was founded on a multitiered edifice of falsehood and deceit, coordinated by the U.S. government and faithfully amplified by the corporate media.
And there it was again. Another religion turned against itself. Another edifice constructed by the human mind, decimated by human nature.
Human rights are fundamental rights, they are the minimum, the very least we demand. Too often, they become the goal itself. What should be the minimum becomes the maximum -- all we are supposed to expect -- but human rights aren't enough. The goal is, and must always be, justice.
Ever since the Great Depression, we know that one of the key ways in which the US economy has stimulated growth is by manufacturing weapons and exporting war to other countries.
The U.S. corporate media, otherwise known as the free press, is that hollow pillar on which contemporary American democracy rests.
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.
It was raining when Rahel came back to Ayemenem. Slanting silver ropes slammed into loose earth, plowing it up like gunfire. The old house on the hill wore its steep, gabled roof pulled over its ears like a low hat.
That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.
The gist of it was the caste (privileged) hindus wanted the power to close the door on untouchables, but on no account could untouchables be given the power to close the door on themselves. The Masters knew that Choice was Power.
The people who created the crisis in the first place will not be the ones that come up with a solution.
It is true that success is the most boring thing, it is tinny and brittle, failure runs deeper. Success is dangerous. I have a very complicated relationship with that word.