Arundhati Roy Quotes

This historical dredging is not offered as an accusation or a provocation. But just to share the grief of history. To thin the mists a little. To say to the citizens of America, in the gentlest, most human way: “Welcome to the World.”

On bad days the orange walls held hands and bent over him, inspecting him, like malevolent doctors, slowly, deliberately, squeezing the breath out of him and making him scream. Sometimes they receded of their own accord, and the room he lay in grew impossibly large, terrorizing him with the specter of his own insignificance. That too made him cry out.

An Urdu couplet by one of his favorite poets, Mir Taqi Mir: Jis sar ko ghurur aaj hai yaan taj-vari ka Kal uss pe yahin shor hai phir nauhagari ka The head which today proudly flaunts a crown Will tomorrow, right here, in lamentation drown.

للدنيا طرق أخرى في تحطيم البشر

Mar gayee bulbul qafas mein Keh gayee sayyaad se Apni sunehri gaand mein Tu thoons le fasl-e-bahaar She died in her cage, the little bird, These words she left for her captor – Please take the spring harvest And shove it up your gilded arse

Debating Imperialism is a bit like debating the pros and cons of rape. What can we say? That we really miss it?

Neither question nor answer was meant as anything more than a polite preamble to conversation.

Capitalism’s gratuitous wars and sanctioned greed have jeopardized the planet and filled it with refugees. Much of the blame for this rests squarely on the shoulders of the government of the United States. Seventeen years after invading Afghanistan, after bombing it into the ‘stone age’ with the sole aim of toppling the Taliban, the US government is back in talks with the very same Taliban. In the interim it has destroyed Iraq, Libya and Syria. Hundreds of thousands have lost their lives to war and sanctions, a whole region has descended into chaos, ancient cities—pounded into dust. Amidst the desolation and the rubble, a monstrosity called Daesh (ISIS) has been spawned. It has spread across the world, indiscriminately murdering ordinary people who had absolutely nothing to do with America's wars. Over these last few years, given the wars it has waged, and the international treaties it has arbitrarily reneged on, the US Government perfectly fits its own definition of a rogue state.

Power is fortified not just by what it destroys, but also by what it creates. Not just by what it takes, but also by what it gives. And powerlessness reaffirmed not just by the helplessness of those who have lost, but also by the gratitude of those who have (or THINK they have) gained.

Normalcy was declared. (Normalcy was always a declaration.)

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.

Her grief grieved her. His devastated her.

The TV channels never ran out of sponsorship for their live telecasts of despair. They never ran out of despair

It didn't matter that the story had begun, because kathakali discovered long ago that the secrets of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones that you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don't deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don't surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover's skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don't. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won't. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn't. And yet you want to know again.
That is their mystery and their magic.

Silence hung in the air like secret loss.