602 Quotes by Arundhati Roy

Ammu shook her and told her to Stoppit and she Stoppited.

It was a time when the unthinkable became the thinkable and the impossible really happened.

So here we have it. The equivocating distinction between civilisation and savagery, between the “massacre of innocent people” or, if you like, “a clash of civilisations” and “collateral damage”. The sophistry and fastidious algebra of infinite justice.

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?

Somehow the idea of dictating things, Tilo said, seemed to make her mother feel that she was still the captain of the ship, still in charge of something, and that calmed her down considerably.

Wars are never fought for altruistic reasons. They’re usually fought for hegemony, for business. And then of course there’s the business of war.

In the year she knew him, before they were married, she discovered a little magic in herself, and for a while felt like a blithe genie released from a lamp. She was perhaps too young to realize that what she assumed was her love for Chacko was actually a tentative, timorous, acceptance of herself.

I feel ashamed that the new, nuclear, neo-liberal India thinks of itself as a ‘natural ally’ of Israel. Ever since India began to call itself an emerging superpower, it has become a slavish, groveling satellite state of the US.

All they have to do is to turn around and shoot. All the people have to do is to lie down and die.