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Arundhati Roy
123 quotes
“Independence itself came to us as what Gandhi famously called a "wooden loaf'-a notional freedom tainted by the blood of the thousands who died during Partition.”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: War Talk (2003)
“the writer is the mid wife of understanding.”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) first seen 2018 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: in Every Day a Word Surprises Me & Other Quotes by Writers by Phaidon (2018) with citation
“Kashmir has never been an integral part of India. I know the story of the Kashmiri pandits. I also know that the story that these Panun Kashmir pandits put out is false. However, this does not mean that injustice was not done. The British drew the map of India in 1899— so that country became a colonizing power the moment it became independent, and the Indian state has militarily intervened in Manipur, in Nagaland, in Mizoram, in Kashmir, in Telangana, during the Naxalbari uprising, in Punjab, in Hyderabad, in Goa, in Junagarh…”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 21st October 2010. The "Seditionist" Speech
“If you are religious, then remember that this bomb is Man's challenge to God. It's worded quite simply: We have the power to destroy everything that You have created. If you're not religious, then look at it this way. This world of ours is 4 600 000 000 years old. It could end in an afternoon.”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The End of Imagination August, 1998 .
“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.”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Greater Common Good May, 1999 .
“India lives in her villages, we are told in every other sanctimonious public speech, That's bullshit. India doesn't live in her villages. India dies in her villages. India gets kicked around in her villages. India lives in her cities. India's villages just live only to serve her cities. Her villages are her citizen's vassals and for that reason must be controlled and kept alive, but only just.”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Greater Common Good May, 1999 .
“The story of the Narmada valley is nothing less than the story of Modern India. Like the tiger in the Belgrade zoo during the NATO bombing, we've begun to eat our own limbs.”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Preface to The Cost of Living July 1999.
“These horrific murders are only a symptom of a deeper malaise. Life is hell for the living too. Whole populations — millions of Dalits, Adivasis, Muslims and Christians — are being forced to live in terror, unsure of when and from where the assault will come.”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Kashmir has never been an integral part of India. It is a historical fact. Even the Indian government has accepted this.”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A train full of pilgrims coming back from the destruction of this Ayodhya mosque which was disputed. The train caught fire; nobody knows who set fire to the train and 57 pilgrims were burnt...”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The trouble is that once America goes off to war, it can't very well return without having fought one. If it doesn't find its enemy, for the sake of the enraged folks back home, it will have to manufacture one. Once war begins, it will develop a momentum, a logic and a justification of its own, and we'll lose sight of why it's being fought in the first place.”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) first seen 2001 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Algebra of Infinite Justice September 29, (2001) .
“Here is a list of the countries that America has been at war with - and bombed - since the second world war: China (1945-46, 1950-53), Korea (1950-53), Guatemala (1954, 1967-69), Indonesia (1958), Cuba (1959-60), the Belgian Congo (1964), Peru (1965), Laos (1964-73), Vietnam (1961-73), Cambodia (1969-70), Grenada (1983), Libya (1986), El Salvador (1980s), Nicaragua (1980s), Panama (1989), Iraq (1991-99), Bosnia (1995), Sudan (1998), Yugoslavia (1999). And now Afghanistan.”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People rarely win wars, governments rarely (completely) lose them. People (do completely) get killed.”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) first seen 2001 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Why America must stop the war now (23 October 2001) .
“The story of the tragic decline of an Indian family whose members suffer the terrible consequences of forbidden love, The God of Small Things is set in the state of Kerala, on the southernmost tip of India.”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In those early amorphous years of life, when memory had only just begun, when life was full of Beginnings and no Ends, and everything was Forever”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Her own grief grieved her. His devastated her. (On Sophie Mol's death, describing Mamachi's grief, and Chacko's).”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ammu explained to Estha and Rahel that people always loved best what they Identified most with.”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much.”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Kochu Maria watched with her cake-crumbs. The Fond Smiles watched Fondly. Little Girls Playing. Sweet. One beach-coloured. One brown. One Loved. One Loved a Little Less.”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ammu had an elaborate Calcutta wedding. Later, looking back on the day, Ammu realized that the slightest feverish glitter in her bridegroom's eyes had not been love, or even excitement at the prospect of carnal bliss, but approximately eight large pegs of whiskey. Straight. Neat.”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Humbling was a nice word, Rahel thought. Humbling along without a care in the world.”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She wondered what had caused the bald pilgrims to vomit so uniformly, and whether they had vomited together in a single, well-orchestrated heave (to music perhaps, to the rhythm of a bus bhajan), or separately, one at a time.”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“'Ammu,' Chacko said, his voice steady and deliberately casual, 'is it at all possible for you to prevent your washed-up cynicism from completely colouring everything?' Silence filled the car like a saturated sponge. Washed-up cut like a knife through a small thing. The sun shone with a shuddering sigh. This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt.”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He watched her. He took his time. Had he known that he was about to enter a tunnel whose only egress was his own annihilation, would he have turned away? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Who can tell?”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Thirty-one. Not old. Not young. But a viable die-able age.”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He stepped onto the path that led through the swamp to the History House. He left no ripples in the water. No footprints on the shore. He held his mundu spread above his head to dry. The wind lifted it like a sail. He was suddenly happy.Things will get worse, he thought to himself. Then better. He was walking swiftly now, towards the Heart of Darkness. As lonely as a wolf. The God of Loss. The God of Small Things. Naked but for his nail varnish.”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The U.S. empire rests on a grisly foundation: the massacre of millions of indigenous people, the stealing of their lands, and following this, the kidnapping and en- slavement of millions of black people from Africa to work that land. Thousands died on the seas while they were being shipped like caged cattle between continents. "Stolen from Africa, brought to America"-Bob Marley's "Buffalo Soldier" contains a whole universe of unspeakable sadness.”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are many Americans who would be mortified to be associated with their government's policies. The most scholarly, scathing, incisive, hilarious critiques of the hypocrisy and the contradictions in U.S. government policy come from American citizens. When the rest of the world wants to know what the U.S. government is up to, we turn to Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Howard Zinn, Ed Herman, Amy Goodman, Michael Albert, Chalmers Johnson , William Blum, and Anthony Arnove to tell us what's really going on.”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What can we do? We can hone our memory, we can learn from our history. We can continue to build public opinion until it becomes a deafening roar. We can turn the war on Iraq into a fishbowl of the U.S. government's excesses. We can expose George Bush and Tony Blair-and their allies for the cowardly baby killers, water poisoners, and pusillanimous long-distance bombers that they are.”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“While, legally and constitutionally, speech may be free, the space in which that freedom can be exercised has been snatched from us and auctioned to the highest bidders.”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Modern democracies have been around long enough for neoliberal capitalists to learn how to subvert them. They have mastered the technique of infiltrating the instruments of democracy—the 'independent' judiciary, the 'free' press, the parliament—and moulding them to their purpose.”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“These interviews were a flexible way of thinking aloud, of exploring idea, personal As well as political, without having to nail them down with an artificially structured cohesion and fit them into an unassailable grand thesis. This book was born and raised in that amorphous, luminal space – somewhere between the spoken and the written word. (Preface)”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Osama Bin Laden and George Bush were both terrorists. They were both building international networks that perpetrate terror and devastate people’s lives. Bush with the Pentagon, the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank. Bin Laden with Al-Qaeda. The difference is that nobody elected Bin Laden...”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) first seen 2008 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Arundhati Roy in The Shape of the Beast: Conversations with Arundhati Roy (2008) p.91
“The United States supported Saddam Hussein and made sure that he ruled with an iron fist for all those years. Then they used the sanctions to break the back of civil society. Then they made Iraq disarm. Then they attacked Iraq. And now they’ve taken over all its assets. p. 126-127”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“she had learned from experience that Need was a warehouse that could accommodate a considerable amount of cruelty. (p10)”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The TV channels never ran out of sponsorship for their live telecasts of despair. They never ran out of despair. (p103)”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I use the word love loosely, and only because my vocabulary is unequal to the task of describing the precise nature of that maze, that forest of feelings... (p153)”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. (p154-5)”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“maybe that’s what life is, or ends up being most of the time: a rehearsal for a performance that never eventually materializes. (p155)”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The moment I saw her, a part of me walked out of my body and wrapped itself around her. And there it still remains. (p156)”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Even in the most uneventful of our lives, we are called upon to choose our battles (p165)”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...India belongs not to Punjabis, Biharis, Gujaratis, Madrasis, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, Christians, but to those beautiful creatures—peacocks, elephants, tigers, bears…" (p172)”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People—communities, castes, races and even countries—carry their tragic histories and their misfortunes around like trophies, or like stock, to be bought and sold on the open market. (p198)”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. (p235)”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Who can know from the word goodbye what kind of parting is in store for us. (p260)”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sleep came to them, quick and easy, like money to millionaires. (p261)”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source