602 Quotes by Arundhati Roy

Silence hung in the air like secret loss.

It’s a battle of those who know how to think against those who know how to hate.

The connection between racism and casteism was made more than a century before the 2001 Durban conference. Empathy sometimes achieves what scholarship cannot.

Addiction has its own mnemonics- skin, smell, the length of the loved one’s fingers. In Tilo’s case it was the slant of her eyes, the shape of her mouth, the almost invisible scar that slightly altered the symmetry of her lips and made her look defiant even when she did not mean to, the way her nostrils flared, announcing the displeasure even before hr eyes did.

She knew he’d be back. No matter how elaborate its charade, she recognized loneliness when she saw it. She sensed that in some strange tangential way, he needed her shade as much as she needed his. And she had learned from experience that Need was a warehouse that could accommodate a considerable amount of cruelty.

The American people ought to know that it is not them, but their government’s policies, that are so hated.

When you recreate the image of man, why repeat God’s mistakes?

She wondered how to un-know certain things, certain specific things that she knew but did not wish to know.

The truth is that she traveled back to Kashmir to still her troubled heart, and to atone for a crime she hadn’t committed.