602 Quotes by Arundhati Roy

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.

In the years to come they would replay this scene in their heads. As children. As teenagers. As adults. Had they been deceived into doing what they did? Had they been tricked into condemnation? In a way, yes. But it wasn’t as simple as that. They both knew that they had been given a choice. And how quick they had been in the choosing it! They hadn’t given it more than a second of thought before they looked up and said (not together, but almost) “Save Ammu.” Save us. Save our mother. (302)

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 story flared, then faded.

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.

(a) Going to Oxford didn't necessarily make a person clever.(b) Cleverness didn't necessarily make a good prime minister.(c) If a person couldn't even run a pickle factory profitably, how was that person going to run a whole country?And, most important of all:(d) All Indian mothers are obsessed with their sons and are therefore poor judges of their abilities.

When you live in the United States, with the roar of the free market, the roar of this huge military power, the roar of being at the heart of empire, it's hard to hear the whispering of the rest of the world. And I think many US citizens want to. I don't think that all of them necessarily are co-conspirators in this concept of empire. And those who are not, need to listen to other stories in the world - other voices, other people.

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.

Cow, goat, chicken, lamb . . . only slaves eat like this,’ Musa said, heaping an impolite amount on to his plate. ‘Our stomachs are graveyards.