Arundhati Roy Quotes

That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.

There's really no such thing as the 'voiceless'. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.

Wars are never fought for altruistic reasons. They're usually fought for hegemony, for business. And then of course there's the business of war.

He folded his fear into a perfect rose. He held it out in the palm of his hand. She took it from him and put it in her hair.

Ammu said that human beings were creatures of habit, and it was amazing the kind of things one could get used to.

...a political struggle that does not have women at the heart of it, above it, below it, and within it is no struggle at all.

She viewed ethnic cleansing, famine and genocide as direct threats to her furniture.

NGOs are dangerous. They do what the missionaries used to do in Colonial times. They are Trojan Horses. The worse the situation, the more the NGOs.

Empathy may be the single most important quality that must be nurtured to give peace a fighting chance.

Railing against the past will not heal us. History has happened. It's over and done with. All we can do is to change its course by encouraging what we love instead of destroying what we don't.

The people who created the crisis in the first place will not be the ones that come up with a solution.

The only thing worth globalizing is dissent.

Sometimes there's truth in old cliches. There can be no real peace without justice. And without resistance there will be no justice.

If we were to lose the ability to be emotional, if we were to lose the ability to be angry, to be outraged, we would be robots. And I refuse that.

States have invested themselves with the right to legitimise violence - so who gets criminalised and delegitimised? Only - or well that's excessive - usually, the resistance.

Making bombs will only destroy us. It doesn't matter whether we use them or not. They will destroy us either way.

Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century.

Violating human rights is integral to the project of neoliberalism and global hegemony.

Fascism itself can only be turned away if all those who are outraged by it show a commitment to social justice that equals the intensity of their indignation.

Use your art to fight.

If you're happy in a dream, does that count?

If he touched her, he couldn't talk to her, if he loved her he couldn't leave, if he spoke he couldn't listen, if he fought he couldn't win.

Flags are bits of colored cloth used first to shrinkwrap people's brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.

Things can change in a day.

Either way, change will come. It could be bloody, or it could be beautiful. It depends on us.

I think many people were surprised by the victory of the Congress, because it was really hard to see beyond the sort of haze of hatred that the Hindu nationalists had been spreading.

Some things come with their own punishments.

It is such a supreme folly to believe that nuclear weapons are deadly only if they're used.

Even capitalists must surely admit, that intellectually at least, socialism is a worthy opponent. It imparts intelligence even to its adversaries.

Insanity hovered close at hand, like an eager waiter at an expensive restaurant.

As a woman who grew up in a village in India, I've spent my whole life fighting tradition. There's no way that I want to be a traditional Indian housewife.

Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Suddenly, they become the bleached bones of a story.

When people say "the people" or "the public" as though it's the final repository of all morality, I sometimes flinch.

Anything's possible in Human Nature ...Love. Madness. Hope. Infinite joy.

Many people have accused me of having a romantic view, whereas I personally I feel sorry for those who have lost romance in their lives.

It was a time when the unthinkable became the thinkable and the impossible really happened

Excitement always leads to tears.

What came for them? Not death. Just the end of living.

Literature is the opposite of a nuclear bomb.

It is true that success is the most boring thing, it is tinny and brittle, failure runs deeper. Success is dangerous. I have a very complicated relationship with that word.

Sometimes I think the world is divided into those who have a comfortable relationship with power and those who have a naturally adversarial relationship with power.

Acceptance spells death to a writer.

Change is one thing. Acceptance is another.

The American way of life is not sustainable. It doesn’t acknowledge that there is a world beyond America.

Terrorism is the symptom, not the disease.

The way her body existed only where he touched her. The rest of her was smoke.

The mullahs of the Islamic world and the mullahs of the Hindu world and the mullahs of the Christian world are all on the same side. And we are against them all.

Is globalization about 'the eradication of world poverty,' or is it a mutant variety of colonialism, remote controlled and digitally operated?

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