602 Quotes by Arundhati Roy

They sensed somehow that she lived in the prenumbral shadows between two worlds, just beyond the grasp of their power. That a woman that they had already damned, now had little left to lose, and could therefore be dangerous. So on the days that the radio played Ammu's songs, people avoided her, making little loops around her, because everybody agreed that it was best to just Let Her Be.

Red ants that had a sour farty smell when they were squashed.

The only thing worth globalizing is dissent.

The first step towards reimagining a world gone terribly wrong would be to stop the annihilation of those a different imagination - an imagination that is outside of Capitalism as well as Communism. An imagination that has an altogether different understanding of what constitutes happiness and fulfillment.

As a writer, one spends a lifetime journeying into the heart of language, trying to minimize, if not eliminate, the distance between language and thought.

She woke to the sound of his heart knocking against his chest. As though it was searching for a way out.

She viewed ethnic cleansing, famine and genocide as direct threats to her furniture.

- Si on est heureux pendant un rêve, Ammu, est-ce que ça compte? demanda Estha.- Qu'est-ce qui compte?- Le bonheur en rêve, est-ce qu'il compte, comme le vrai?Elle savait exactement ce qu'il voulait dire, son fils avec sa banane écrasée.Parce que, à vrai dire, seul ce qui compte est à prendre en compte.Sagesse naïve, incontournable, des enfants.Si on mange du poisson en rêve, est-ce que ça compte? Est-ce que ça veut dire qu'on a vraiment mangé du poisson?

No matter how elaborate its charade, she recognised loneliness when she saw it.