602 Quotes by Arundhati Roy

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

Every tie a pye-dog strayed onto the road, the driver made a sincere effort to kill it.(108)

In battle, Musa told Tilo, enemies can’t break your spirit, only friends can

Across the world, when governments and the media lavish all their time, attention, funds, research, space, sophistication, and seriousness on war talk and terrorism, then the message that goes out is disturbing and dangerous: If you seek to air and redress a public grievance, violence is more effective than non-violence. Unfortunately, if peaceful change is not given a chance, then violent change becomes inevitable.

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.

Sitting next to Tilo, breathing next to her, he felt like an empty house whose locked windows and doors were creaking open a little, to air the ghosts trapped inside it.

Have we raised the threshold of horror so high that nothing short of a nuclear strike qualifies as a 'real' war? Are we to spend the rest of our lives in this state of high alert with guns pointed at each other's heads and fingers trembling on the trigger?

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

When she listened to songs that she loved on the radio, something stirred inside her. A liquid ache spread under her skin, and she walked out of the world like a witch.