Arundhati Roy: Trending quotes (page 2)

“When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.”

“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.”

“I am completely a loner. In my head I want to feel I can be anywhere. There is a sort of recklessness that being a loner allows me.”

“There is a war that makes us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.”

“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.”

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

“Some things come with their own punishments.”

“As Estha stirred the thick jam he thought Two Thoughts and the Two Thoughts he thought were these:
a) Anything can happen to anyone.
and
b) It is best to be prepared.”

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

“It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that is purloined.”

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

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

“Her own grief grieved her. His devastated her.”

“There are things that you can't do - like writing letters to a part of yourself. To your feet or hair. Or heart.”

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

“And there it was again. Another religion turned against itself. Another edifice constructed by the human mind, decimated by human nature.”

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

“Smells, like music, hold memories. She breathed deep, and bottled it up for posterity.”

“The trouble is that once you see it, you can't unsee it. And once you've seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There's no innocence. Either way, you're accountable.”