Arundhati Roy Quotes

The fact that something so fragile, so unbearably tender had survived, had been allowed to exist, was a miracle.

Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead. When independent-thinking people (and here I do not include the corporate media) begin to rally under flags, when writers, painters, musicians, film makers suspend their judgment and blindly yoke their art to the service of the “Nation,” it’s time for all of us to sit up and worry.

Normality in our part of the world is a bit like a boiled egg: its humdrum surface conceals at its heart a yolk of egregious violence. It is our constant anxiety about that violence, our memory of its past labours and our dread of its future manifestations, that lays down the rules for how a people as complex and as diverse as we continue to coexist – continue to live together, tolerate each other and, from time to time, murder one another. As long as the centre holds, as long as the yolk doesn’t run, we’ll be fine. In moments of crisis it helps to take the long view.

She had never before met a man who spoke of the world — of what it was, and how it came to be, or what he thought would become of it — in the way in which other men she knew discussed their jobs, their friends or their weekends at the beach.
Being with Chacko made Margaret feel as though her soul had escaped from the narrow confines of her island country into the vast, extravagant spaces of his. He made her feel as though the world belonged to them — as though it lay before them like an opened frog on a dissecting table, begging to be examined.
In the year she knew them, before they were married, she discovered a little magic in herself, and for a while felt like a blithe genie released from her lamp. She was perhaps too young to realize that what she assumed was her love for Chacko was actually a tentative, timorous, acceptance of herself.

There are things that can be forgotten. And things that cannot - that sit on dusty shelves like stuffed birds with baleful, sideways staring eyes.

Old. A viable die-able age.

They all broke the rules. They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much. The laws that make grandmothers grandmothers, uncles uncles, mothers mothers, cousins cousins, jam jam, and jelly jelly.
It was a time when uncles became fathers, mothers lovers, and cousins died and had funerals.
It was a time when the unthinkable became thinkable and the impossible really happened.

I don’t know where to stop, or how to go on. I stop when I shouldn’t. I go on when I should stop. There is weariness. But there is also defiance. Together they define me these days. Together they steal my sleep, and together they restore my soul. There are plenty of problems with no solutions in sight. Friends turn into foes. If not vocal ones, then silent, reticent ones. But I’ve yet to see a foe turning into a friend. There seems to be no hope. But pretending to be hopeful is the only grace we have . . .

K H A D I J A S A Y S . . .
In Kashmir when we wake up and say ‘Good Morning’ what we really mean is ‘Good Mourning’.

Do we need weapons to fight wars? Or do we need wars to create markets for weapons?

Our dreams have been doctored.We belong no where. We sail unanchored on troubled seas.We may never be allowed ashore. Our sorrows will never be sad enough. Our joys never happy enough. Our dreams never big enough. Our lives never important enough. To matter..

NGOs have a complicated space in neoliberal politics. They are supposed to mop up the anger. Even when they are doing good work, they are supposed to maintain the status quo. They are the missionaries of the corporate world.

Let's leave one alive so that it can be lonely.

He walked on water. Perhaps. But could he have *swum* on land? In matching knickers and dark glasses? With his Fountain in a Love-in-Tokyo? In pointy shoes and a puff? Would he have had the imagination?

He remained restrained and strangely composed. It was a composure born of extreme provocation. It stemmed from a lucidity that lies beyond rage.