602 Quotes by Arundhati Roy

They were State-of-the-Art machines. They could flatten history and stack it up like building material.

The room had kept his secrets. It gave nothing away. Not in the disarray of rumpled sheets, nor the untidiness of a kicked off shoe, or a wet towel hung over the back of a chair. Or a half-read book. It was like a room in a hospital after the nurse had just been. The floor was clean, the walls white. The cupboard closed. Shoes arranged. The dustbin empty.

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

They’re mostly rich folk who live in our poor country like captive animals, incarcerated by their own wealth, locked and barred in their gilded cages, protecting themselves from the threat of the vulgar and unruly multitudes whom they have systematically dispossessed over the centuries.

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

Like cities. Fizzy, effervescent, simulating the illusion of life while the planet they had plundered died around them.

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.

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.

Poetry, music and literature, he believed, ought not to be interrupted by the banality of war.