602 Quotes by Arundhati Roy

He looked cheerful, as though he was with an imaginary friend whose company he enjoyed.

It was herself she was exhausted by. She had lost the ability to keep her discrete worlds discrete – a skill that many consider to be the cornerstone of sanity. The traffic inside her head seemed to have stopped believing in traffic lights. The result was incessant noise, a few bad crashes and eventually gridlock.

She wondered what an unreleased soul, a soul-shaped stone on a funeral pyre, might look like. Like a starfish maybe. Or a millipede. Or a dappled moth with a living body and stone wings – poor moth – betrayed, held down by the very things that were meant to help it to fly.

Poverty is a crime and the poor are terrorists.

Does a country fall into fascism the way a person falls in love? Or, more accurately, in hate?

If you think of the world as a global village, a fight between India and Pakistan is like a fight between the poorest people in the poorest quarters – the Adivasis and the Dalits. And in the meantime, the zamindars are laying the oil pipelines and selling both parties weapons.

Coercing a woman out of a burka is as bad as coercing her into one. It’s not about the burka. It’s about the coercion.

Nietzsche believed that if Pity were to become the core of ethics, misery would become contagious and happiness an object of suspicion.

If he touched her, he couldn’t talk to her, if he loved her he couldn’t leave, if he spoke he couldn’t listen, if he fought he couldn’t win.