602 Quotes by Arundhati Roy

The crowd made room for the press respectfully. It knew that without the journalists and photographers the massacre would be erased and the dead would truly die. So the bodies were offered to them, in hope and anger. A banquet of death.

Not everybody likes the idea of their cities filling up with the poor. A judge in Bombay called slum dwellers pickpockets of urban land. Another said, while ordering the bulldozing of unauthorized colonies, that people who couldn’t afford to live in cities shouldn’t live in them. When those who had been evicted went back to where they came from, they found their villages had disappeared under great dams and dusty quarries.

She gave the impression that she had somehow slipped off her leash. As though she was taking herself for a walk while the rest of us were being walked – like pets. As.

Was it possible to live outside language? Naturally this question did not address itself to her in words, or as a single lucid sentence. It addressed itself to her as a soundless, embryonic howl.

Diclofenac, cow aspirin, given to cattle as a muscle relaxant, to ease pain and increase the production of milk, works – worked – like nerve gas on white-backed vultures. Each chemically relaxed, milk-producing cow or buffalo that died became poisoned vulture bait.

But for now, it even has a Gandhian approach to sabotage; before a police vehicle is burnt for example, it is stripped down and every part is cannibalized. The steering wheel is straightened out and made into a bharmaar barrel, the rexine upholstery stripped and used for ammunition pouches, the battery for solar charging. Should I write a play I wonder- Gandhi Get Your Gun. Or will I be lynched?

Baby Kochamma grudged them their moments of high happiness when a dragonfly they’d caught lifted a small stone off their palms with its legs, or when they had permission to bathe the pigs, or they found an egg hot form a hen. But most of all, she grudged them the comfort they drew from each other. She expected from them some token unhappiness. At the very least.

As a woman who grew up in a village in India, I’ve spent my whole life fighting tradition. There’s no way that I want to be a traditional Indian housewife.

Rahel’s “list” was an attempt to order chaos. She revised it constantly, torn forever between love and duty. It was by no means a true gauge of her feelings.