Arundhati Roy Quotes

The only dream worth having, I told her, is to dream that you will live while you're alive and die only when you're dead.

Capitalism is destroying the planet. The two old tricks that dug it out of past crises--War and Shopping--simply will not work.

It turned out to be a war which, unfortunately for Comrade Pillai, would end almost before it began. Victory was gifted to him wrapped and beribboned, on a silver tray. Only then, when it was too late, and Paradise Pickles slumped softly to the floor without so much as a murmur or even the pretense of resistance, did Comrade Pillai realize that what he really needed was the process of war more than the outcome of victory. War could have been the stallion that he rode, part of, if not all, the way to the Legislative Assembly, whereas victory left him no better off than when he started out.He broke the eggs but burned the omelette.

DB: There's a lot of talk about terrorism. In fact, it's become almost an obsession for the media in the United States. But it's a very narrow definition of terrorism.AR: Yes. It completely ignores the economic terrorism unleashed by neoliberalism, which devastates the lives of millions of people, depriving them of water, food, electricity. Denying them medicine. Denying them education. Terrorism is the logical extension of this business of the free market. Terrorism is the privatization of war. Terrorists are the free marketeers of war - people who believe that it isn't only the state that can wage war, but private parties as well.If you look at the logic underlying an act of terrorism and the logic underlying a retaliatory war against terrorism, they are the same. Both terrorists and governments make ordinary people pay for the actions of their governments. Osama bin Laden is making people pay for the actions of the US state, whether it's in Saudi Arabia, Palestine, or Afghanistan. The US government is making the people of Iraq pay for the actions of Saddam Hussein. The people of Afghanistan pay for the crimes of the Taliban. The logic is the same.Osama bin Laden and George Bush are both terrorists. They are 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.

Still the Amaltas bloomed, a brilliant, defiant yellow. Each blazing summer it reached up and whispered to the hot brown sky, Fuck You.

Even in the most uneventful of our lives, we are called upon to choose our battles...

Flat muscled and honey coloured. Sea secrets in his eyes. A silver raindrop in his ear.

Who can know from the word goodbye what kind of parting is in store for us.

It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain. To let it be, to travel with it, as Velutha did, is much the harder thing to do.

She discovered that underneath the aspect of the Rumpled Porcupine, a tortured Marxist was at war with an impossible, incurable Romantic - who forgot the candles, who broke the wine glasses, who forgot the ring. Who made love to her with a passion that took her breath away. She had always thought of herself as a somewhat uninteresting, thick-waisted, thick ankled girl. Not bad-looking. Not special. But when she was with Chacko, old limits were pushed back. Horizons expanded.She had never before met a man who spoke of the workd - 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 Kochamma 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 thm like an opened frog on a dissecting table, begging to be examined.

Glanced up and caught Ammu's gaze. Centuries telescoped into one evanescent moment. History was wrong-footed, caught off guard. Sloughed off like an old snakeskin. Its marks , its scars its wouns from old wars and the walking backwards days all fell away. In its abscence it left an aura, a palpable shimmering that was as plain as water in a river or the sun in the sky. As plain to feel the heat on a hot day, or the tug of a fish on a taut line. So obvious that no-one noticed. In that brief moment, Velutha looked up and saw things that he hadn't seen before. Things that had been out of bounds so far, obscured by histor's blinkers....This knowing slid into him cleanly, like the sharp edge of a knife. Cold and hot at once. It only took a moment. Ammu saw that he saw. She looked away. He did too. History's fiends returned to claim them. To rewrap them in its old scarred pelt and drag them back to where they really lived. Where the Love Laws lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much.

The war for the Narmada valley is not just some exotic tribal war, or a remote rural war or even an exclusively Indian war. Its a war for the rivers and the mountains and the forests of the world. All sorts of warriors from all over the world, anyone who wishes to enlist, will be honored and welcomed. Every kind of warrior will be needed. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, judges, journalists, students, sportsmen, painters, actors, singers, lovers . . . The borders are open, folks! Come on in.

Trees raised their naked, mottled branches to the sky like mourners stilled in attitudes of grief.

He could do only one thing at a time. If he held her, he couldn't kiss her. If he kissed her, he couldn't see her. If he saw her, he couldn't feel her.

But what was there to say?Only that there were tears. Only that Quietness and Emptiness fitted together like stacked spoons. Only that there was a snuffling in the hollows at the base of a lovely throat. Only that a hard honey-colored shoulder had a semicircle of teethmarks on it. Only that they held each other close, long after it was over. Only that what they shared that night was not happiness, but hideous grief.Only that once again they broke the Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much.

Have we raised the threshold of horror so high that nothing short of a nuclear strike qualifies as a 'real' war? Are we to spend the rest of our lives in this state of high alert with guns pointed at each other's heads and fingers trembling on the trigger?

Her collarbones like wings that spread from the base of her throat to the ends of her shoulders. A bird held down by skin.

How can you measure progress if you don't know what it costs and who has paid for it? How can the "market" put a price on things - food, clothes, electricity, running water - when it doesn't take into account the REAL cost of production?

They looked at each other. They weren't thinking anymore. The time for that had come and gone. Smashed smiles lay ahead of them. But that would be later. Lay Ter.

Socrates asked the key question: why should we be moral?

As for the third Official Reason: exposing Western Hypocrisy - how much more exposed can they be? Which decent human being on earth harbors any illusions about it? These are people whose histories are spongy with the blood of others. Colonialism, apartheid, slavery, ethnic cleansing, germ warfare, chemical weapons - they virtually invented it all.

We ought not to speak only about the economics of globalization, but about the psychology of globalization. It's like the psychology of a battered woman being faced with her husband again and being asked to trust him again. That's what is happening. We are being asked by the countries that invented nuclear weapons and chemical weapons and apartheid and modern slavery and racism - countries that have perfected the gentle art of genocide, that colonized other people for centuries - to trust them when they say that they believe in a level playing field and the equitable distribution of resources and in a better world. It seems comical that we should even consider that they really mean what they say.

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

She thought of the city at night, of cities at night. Discarded constellations of old stars, fallen from the sky, rearranged on Earth in patterns and pathways and towers. Invaded by weevils that have learned to walk upright.

In a determined reversal of her inherent nature, Kochu Maria now, as a policy, hardly ever believed anything that anybody said.

The story flared, then faded.

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

Ammu's tears made everything that had so far seemed unreal, real.

It was raining when Rahel came back to Ayemenem. Slanting silver ropes slammed into loose earth, plowing it up like gunfire. The old house on the hill wore its steep, gabled roof pulled over its ears like a low hat.

They sensed somehow that she lived in the prenumbral shadows between two worlds, just beyond the grasp of their power. That a woman that they had already damned, now had little left to lose, and could therefore be dangerous. So on the days that the radio played Ammu's songs, people avoided her, making little loops around her, because everybody agreed that it was best to just Let Her Be.

The English-language press in India supports the project of corporate globalization fully. It has no time for dispossession and drought and farmers' debts, the ravages that the corporate globalization project is wreaking on the poor of India. So to suddenly turn around and condemn the riots is a typical middle-class response. Let's support everything that leads to the conditions in which the massacre takes place, but when the killing starts, you recoil in middle-class horror, and say, "Oh, that's not very nice. Can't we be more civilized?

Suddenly Ammu hoped that it had been him that Rahel saw him in the march. She hoped it had been him that raised his flag and knotted arm in anger. She hoped that under his careful cloak of cheerfulness he housed a living breathing anger against the smug, ordered world that she raged against.

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.

Any government's condemnation of terrorism is only credible if it shows itself to be responsive to persistent, reasonable, closely argued, non-violent dissent. And yet, what's happening is just the opposite. The world over, non-violent resistance movements are being crushed and broken. If we do not respect and honour them, by default we privilege those who turn to violent means.

At least not until the Terror took hold of him. Not until he saw, night after night, a little boat being rowed across the river. Not until he saw it return at dawn. Not until he saw what his Untouchable son had touched. More than touched.Enter.Loved.

Enemies can't break your spirit, only friends can.

The frozen flowers never go away. They hang around somewhere all the time. I think we need to talk about vases.Did you hear the sound of the white flower?

To fuel yet another war this time against Iraq by cynically manipulating people's grief, by packaging it for TVspecials sponsored by corporations selling detergent and running shoes, is to cheapen and devalue grief, to drain itof meaning. What we are seeing now is a vulgar display of the business of grief, the commerce of grief, the pillagingof even the most private human feelings for political purpose. It is a terrible, violent thing for a State to do to itspeople.

The steel door of the incinerator went up and the muted hum of the eternal fire became a red roaring. The heat lunged out at them like a famished beast. Then Rahel's Ammu was fed to it. Her hair, her skin, her smile. Her voice. They way she used Kipling to love her children before putting them to bed: We be of one blood, though and I. Her goodnight kiss. The way she held their faces steady with one hand (squashed-cheeked, fish-mouthed) while she parted and combed their hair with the other. The way she held knickers out for Rahel to climb into. Left leg, right leg. All this was fed to the beast, and it was satisfied.She was their Ammu and their Baba and she had loved them Double.

People often don't understand the engine that drives corruption. Particularly in India, they assume government equals corruption, private companies equal efficiency. But government officials are not genetically programmed to be corrupt. Corruption is linked to power. If it is the corporations that are powerful, then they will be corrupt.

Cow, goat, chicken, lamb . . . only slaves eat like this,’ Musa said, heaping an impolite amount on to his plate. ‘Our stomachs are graveyards.

We're told, often enough, that as a species we are poised on the edge of the abyss. It's possible that our puffed-up, prideful intelligence has outstripped our instinct for survival and the road back to safety has already been washed away. In which case there's nothing much to be done. If there is something to be done, then one thing is for sure: those who created the problem will not be the ones who come up with a solution.

When she listened to songs that she loved on the radio, something stirred inside her. A liquid ache spread under her skin, and she walked out of the world like a witch.

But Tilo had crept up on him, and become a kind of compulsion, an addiction almost. Addiction has its own mnemonics – skin, smell, the length of the loved one’s fingers. In Tilo’s case it was the slant of her eyes, the shape of her mouth, the almost ­invisible scar that slightly altered the symmetry of her lips and made her look defiant even when she did not mean to, the way her nostrils flared, announcing her displeasure even before her eyes did. The way she held her shoulders. The way she sat on the pot stark naked and smoked cigarettes. So many years of marriage, the fact that she was not young any more – and did nothing to pretend otherwise – didn’t change the way he felt. Because it had to do with more than all that. It was the haughtiness (despite the question mark over her ‘stock’, as his mother had not hesitated to put it). It had to do with the way she lived, in the country of her own skin. A country that issued no visas and seemed to have no consulates.

Perhaps it’s true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes. And that when they do, those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned house—the charred clock, the singed photograph, the scorched furniture—must be resurrected from the ruins and examined. Preserved. Accounted for. Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story.

And once again, only the Small Things were said. The Big Things lurked unsaid inside.

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.

But can we, should we, let apprehensions about the future immobilize us in the present?

If you think of the world as a global village, a fight between India and Pakistan is like a fight between the poorest people in the poorest quarters - the Adivasis and the Dalits. And in the meantime, the zamindars are laying the oil pipelines and selling both parties weapons.

I think it is dangerous to confuse the idea of democracy with elections. Just because you have elections doesn't mean you're a democratic country. They're a very vitally important part of a democracy. But there are other things that ought to function as checks and balances. If elections are the only thing that matter, then people are going to resort to anything to win that election.

She could hear her hair growing. It sounded like something crumbling. A burnt thing crumbling. Coal. Toast. Moths crisped on a light bulb. She remembered reading somewhere that even after people died, their hair and nails kept growing. Like starlight, travelling through the universe long after the stars themselves had died. Like cities. Fizzy, effervescent, simulating the illusion of life while the planet they had plundered died around them.

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

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

His gratitude widened his smile and bent his back.

They only asked for punishments that fitted their crimes. Not ones that came like cupboards with built-in bedrooms. Not ones you spent your whole life in, wandering through its maze of shelves.

History is really a study of the future, not the past.

Heaven opened and the water hammered down, reviving the reluctant old well, greenmossing the pigless pigsty, carpet bombing still, tea-colored puddles the way memory bombs still, tea-colored minds.

Certainly no beast has essayed the boundless, infinitely inventive art of human hatred. No beast can match its range and power.

Then to give the kids a historical perspective, Chacko told them about the earth woman. He made them imagine that the earth - 4600 million years old - was a 46 year old woman- as old as Aleyamma teaacher, who gave them Malayalam lessons. It had taken the whole of earth woman’s life for the earth to become what it was. For the oceans to part. For the mountains to rise. The earth woman was 11 yrs old when the first single celled organisms appeared. The first animals, creatures like worms and jellyfish, appeared only when she was forty. She was over forty five - just 8 months ago - when dinosaurs roamed the earth. The whole of human civilization as we know it, began only 2 hrs ago in the earth woman’s life…