602 Quotes by Arundhati Roy

It had been quiet in Estha’s head until Rahel came. But with her she had brought the sound of passing trains, and the light and shade that falls on you if you have a window seat.

Now we’re in a situation where democracy has been taken into the workshop and fixed, remodelled to be market friendly. So now the United States is fighting wars to install democracies. First is was topple them, now it’s install them. And the whole rise of corporate-funded NGOs in the modern world, this notion of CSR, corporate social responsibility – it’s all part of a New Managed Democracy. In a sense, it’s all part of the same machine.

If you’re not religious, then look at it this way. This world of ours is four thousand, six hundred million years old. It could end in an afternoon.

Democracy has become Empire’s euphemism for neo-liberal capitalism.

The trees were still green, the sky still blue, which counted for something. So they went ahead and plugged their smelly paradise – God’s Own Country they called it in their brochures – because they knew, those clever Hotel People, that smelliness, like other peoples’ poverty, was merely a matter of getting used to. A question of discipline. Of Rigor and Air-conditioning. Nothing more.

Rahel knew that this had happened because she had been hoping that it wouldn’t. She hadn’t learned to control her Hopes yet.

Indian nationalists and the government seem to believe that they can fortify their idea of a resurgent India with a combination of bullying and Boeing airplanes. But they don’t understand the subversive strength of warm boiled eggs.

Impelled by feelings that were primal yet paradoxically wholly impersonal. Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear – civilization’s fear of nature, men’s fear of women, power’s fear of powerlessness. Man’s subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify.

It’s odd how those who dismiss the peace movement as Utopian proffer the most absurdly dreamy reasons for war.