Arundhati Roy Quotes (122 quotes, page 2)

“It didn't matter that the story had begun, because kathakali discovered long ago that the secrets of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones that you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don't deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don't surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover's skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don't. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won't. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn't. And yet you want to know again.
That is their mystery and their magic.”

Arundhati Roy book The God of Small Things

page 229.
The God of Small Things (1997)
Variant: It didn't matter that the story had begun, because kathakali discovered long ago that the secrets of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones that you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don't deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don't surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover's skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don't. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won't. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn't. And yet you want to know again.
That is their mystery and their magic.

Love , Secret , Way , Lovers

“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

Preface to The Cost of Living July 1999.
Articles

“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

The Algebra of Infinite Justice September 29, (2001) http://web.archive.org/web/20011006030417/http://website.lineone.net/~jon.simmons/roy/010929ij.htm.
Articles

War , Home

“Humbling was a nice word, Rahel thought. Humbling along without a care in the world.”

Arundhati Roy book The God of Small Things

The God of Small Things (1997)

World

“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 book The God of Small Things

The God of Small Things (1997)

Time

“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 book The God of Small Things

page 186
The God of Small Things (1997)

Love , Smile , Girl

“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 book The God of Small Things

The God of Small Things (1997)

Life , Memory

“What does peace mean in a world in which the combined wealth of the world's 587 billionaires exceeds the combined gross domestic product of the world's 135 poorest countries? Or when rich countries that pay farm subsidies of a billion dollars a day, try and force poor countries to drop their subsidies? What does peace mean to people in occupied Iraq, Palestine, Kashmir, Tibet and Chechnya? Or to the aboriginal people of Australia? Or the Ogoni of Nigeria? Or the Kurds in Turkey? Or the Dalits and Adivasis of India? What does peace mean to non-Muslims in Islamic countries, or to women in Iran, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan? What does it mean to the millions who are being uprooted from their lands by dams and development projects? What does peace mean to the poor who are being actively robbed of their resources and for whom everyday life is a grim battle for water, shelter, survival and, above all, some semblance of dignity? For them, peace is war.”

Arundhati Roy

A selection from a speech entitled "Peace given on November 7, 2004 while accepting the Sydney Peace Prize.
Speeches

Life , Women , War , People

“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

Articles

War , World , Country

“Big Dams are to a nation's 'development' what nuclear bombs are to its military arsenal. They're both weapons of mass destruction. They're both weapons governments use to control their own people. Both twentieth-century emblems that mark a point in time when human intelligence has outstripped its own instinct for survival. They're both malignant indications of a civilization turning upon itself. They represent the severing of the link, not just the link -- the understanding-- between human beings and the planet they live on. They scramble the intelligence that connects eggs to hens, milk to cows, food to forests, water to rivers, air to life, and the earth to human existence.”

Arundhati Roy

The Greater Common Good May, 1999 http://www.narmada.org/gcg/gcg.html.
Articles

Life , People , Food , Intelligence

“Her own grief grieved her. His devastated her. (On Sophie Mol's death, describing Mamachi's grief, and Chacko's).”

Arundhati Roy book The God of Small Things

The God of Small Things (1997)

Death

“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

The Greater Common Good May, 1999 http://www.narmada.org/gcg/gcg.html.
Articles

“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

Source: An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire (2005), p. 91

Democracy , Learning

“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

The Greater Common Good May, 1999 http://www.narmada.org/gcg/gcg.html.
Articles

Thinking , Gratitude

“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 book The God of Small Things

The God of Small Things (1997)

Music , Time

“The invasion of Iraq will surely go down in history as one of the most cowardly wars ever fought. It was a war in which a band of rich nations, armed with enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world several times over, rounded on a poor nation, falsely accused it of having nuclear weapons, used the United Nations to force it to disarm, then invaded it, occupied it, and are now in the process of selling it.”

Arundhati Roy

From a speech accepting the Sydney Peace Prize, November 07, 2004 http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=41&ItemID=6594
Speeches

War , World , History , Time

“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 book The God of Small Things

The God of Small Things (1997)

Family , Cars , Silence , Sun

“To the Kathakali Man these stories are his children and his childhood. He has grown up within them. They are the house he was raised in, the meadows he played in. They are his windows and his way of seeing. So when he tells a story, he handles it as he would a child of his own. He teases it. He punishes it. He sends it up like a bubble. He wrestles it to the ground and lets it go again. He laughs at it because he loves it. He can fly you across whole worlds in minutes, he can stop for hours to examine a wilting leaf. Or play with a sleeping monkey's tail. He can turn effortlessly from the carnage of war into the felicity of a woman washing her hair in a mountain stream. From the crafty ebullience of a rakshasa with a new idea into a gossipy Malayali with a scandal to spread. From the sensuousness of a woman with a baby at her breast into the seductive mischief of Krishna's smile. He can reveal the nugget of sorrow that happiness contains. The hidden fish of shame in a sea of glory.
He tells stories of the gods, but his yarn is spun from the ungodly, human heart.
The Kathakali Man is the most beautiful of men. Because his body is his soul. His only instrument. From the age of three he has been planed and polished, pared down, harnessed wholly to the task of story-telling. He has magic in him, this man within the painted mark and swirling skirts.
But these days he has become unviable. Unfeasible. Condemned goods. His children deride him. They long to be everything that he is not. He has watched them grow up to become clerks and bus conductors. Class IV non-gazetted officers. With unions of their own.
But he himself, left dangling somewhere between heaven and earth, cannot do what they do. He cannot slide down the aisles of buses, counting change and selling tickets. He cannot answer bells that summon him. He cannot stoop behind trays of tea and Marie biscuits.
In despair he turns to tourism. He enters the market. He hawks the only thing he owns. The stories that his body can tell.
He becomes a Regional Flavour.”

Arundhati Roy book The God of Small Things

page 230-231.
The God of Small Things (1997)

Love , Men , God , War

“What does the term "anti-American" mean? Does it mean you are anti-jazz? Or that you're opposed to freedom of speech? That you don't delight in Toni Morrison or John Updike? That you have a quarrel with giant sequoias? Does it mean that you don't admire the hundreds of thousands of American citizens who marched against nuclear weapons, or the thousands of war resisters who forced their government to withdraw from Vietnam? Does it mean that you hate all Americans?”

Arundhati Roy

From a speech entitled Come September http://ada.evergreen.edu/~arunc/texts/politics/comeSeptember.pdf.
Speeches

Hate , War , Freedom

“People rarely win wars, governments rarely (completely) lose them. People (do completely) get killed.”

Arundhati Roy

Why America must stop the war now (23 October 2001) http://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/oct/23/afghanistan.terrorism8.
Articles

War , People

“Literature is the opposite of a nuclear bomb.”

Arundhati Roy

From a speech entitled Come September http://ada.evergreen.edu/~arunc/texts/politics/comeSeptember.pdf.
Speeches

Literature

“Kashmir has never been an integral part of India. It is a historical fact. Even the Indian government has accepted this.”

Arundhati Roy

The Guardian, Arundhati Roy https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/oct/28/arundhati-roy-india-kashmir-bjp

Parting

“It's not a real choice. It's an apparent choice. Like choosing a brand of detergent. Whether you buy Ivory Snow or Tide, they're both owned by Proctor & Gamble This doesn't mean that one takes a position that is without nuance, that […] the Democrats and Republicans are the same. Of course, they're not. Neither are Tide and Ivory Snow. Tide has oxy-boosting and Ivory Snow is a gentle cleanser.”

Arundhati Roy

On the American election, 2004 from her speech in San Francisco, California on August 16th, 2004 http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=40&ItemID=6087
Speeches

“Thirty-one.
Not old.
Not young.
But a viable die-able age.”

Arundhati Roy book The God of Small Things

The God of Small Things (1997)

Age

“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 book The God of Small Things

Source: The God of Small Things (1997)

Love , God , Family , Suffering

“He is Karna, whom the world has abandoned. Karna Alone. Condemned goods. A prince raised in poverty. Born to die unfairly, unarmed and alone at the hands of his brother. Majestic in his complete despair. Praying on the banks of the Ganga. Stoned out of his skull.
Then Kunti appeared. She too was a man, but a man grown soft and womanly, a man with breasts, from doing female parts for years. Her movements were fluid. Full of women. Kunti, too, was stoned. High on the same shared joints. She had come to tell Karna a story.
Karna inclined his beautiful head and listened.
Red-eyed, Kunti danced for him. She told him of a young woman who had been granted a boon. A secret mantra that she could use to choose a lover from among the gods. Of how, with the imprudence of youth, the woman decided to test it to see if it really worked. How she stood alone in an empty field, turned her face to the heavens and recited the mantra. The words had scarcely left her foolish lips, Kunti said, when Surya, the God of Day, appeared before her. The young woman, bewitched by the beauty of the shimmering young god, gave herself to him. Nine months later she bore him a son. The baby was born sheathed in light, with gold earrings in his ears and a gold breastplate on his chest, engraved with the emblem of the sun.
The young mother loved her first-born son deeply, Kunti said, but she was unmarried and couldn't keep him. She put him in a reed basket and cast him away in a river. The child was found downriver by Adhirata, a charioteer. And named Karna.
Karna looked up to Kunti. Who was she? Who was my mother? Tell me where she is. Take me to her.
Kunti bowed her head. She's here, she said. Standing before you.
Karna's elation and anger at the revelation. His dance of confusion and despair. Where were you, he asked her, when I needed you the most? Did you ever hold me in your arms? Did you feed me? Did you ever look for me? Did you wonder where I might be?
In reply Kunti took the regal face in her hands, green the face, red the eyes, and kissed him on his brow. Karna shuddered in delight. A warrior reduced to infancy. The ecstasy of that kiss. He dispatched it to the ends of his body. To his toes. His fingertips. His lovely mother's kiss. Did you know how much I missed you? Rahel could see it coursing through his veins, as clearly as an egg travelling down an ostrich's neck.
A travelling kiss whose journey was cut short by dismay when Karna realised that his mother had revealed herself to him only to secure the safety of her five other, more beloved sons - the Pandavas - poised on the brink of their epic battle with their one hundred cousins. It is them that Kunti sought to protect by announcing to Karna that she was his mother. She had a promise to extract.
She invoked the Love Laws.”

Arundhati Roy book The God of Small Things

pages 232-233.
The God of Small Things (1997)

Love , Women , God , Secret

“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 book The God of Small Things

The God of Small Things (1997)

Love , Wedding

“Where there is oppression, it will always be challenged by those of us who will challenge it with greater intensity, you know? So that's why I don't believe that there can ever be peace without justice, you know? The two go together. And there cannot be peace in the world with full-spectrum dominance or, you know, nuclear warfare or any of those things. They won't help, because always there will be people who demand dignity, who demand justice, who demand their rights.”

Arundhati Roy

From an interview with Andrew Denton on Enough Rope screened 18th October 2004 on ABC Australia http://www.abc.net.au/tv/enoughrope/transcripts/s1219838.htm
Interviews

People , World , Peace , Justice

“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 book The God of Small Things

The God of Small Things (1997)

God , History , Wolf , Water

“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

Source: An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire (2005), p. 48

Exercises , Freedom

“The writer Arundhati Roy asserted that a pregnant Muslim woman had been murdered and then her foetus ripped from her womb by rioters. When it became clear that nobody knew of the incident and Roy was asked to come and help the police inquiry to find the unfortunate victim, she replied through her lawyers that there was no power which could compel her to attend. She claimed in addition that Ehsan Jafri’s daughters had been murdered alongside him at Gulbarg Society. This prompted Jafri’s son to write from the United States that there was only one daughter and she was in the US with him.”

Arundhati Roy

Marino, Andy (2014). Narendra Modi: A political biography. Ch. 7.

Help , Daughters

“Arundhati Roy risked the international fame she so clearly cherishes by going public with blatant lies about atrocities against named Gujarati Muslim women who turned out to be either non-existent or abroad at the time of the riots. Perhaps a fiction writer can afford this, but the news media with their deontology of accuracy and objectivity made themselves guilty of similar howlers.”

Arundhati Roy

[Elst, Koenraad, Rao, Prof. Ramesh N., Gujarat after Godhra: real violence, selective outrage, 2003, Har Anand Publications, https://books.google.co.in/books?id=GuJtAAAAMAAJ, With]

Time , Women

“As the essays kept appearing, so did the five male lawyers (not the same ones, different ones, but they seemed to hunt in packs). And so did the criminal cases, mostly for contempt of court. One of them ended in a very short jail sentence, another is still pending. The debates were often acrimonious. Sometimes violent. But always important. Almost every essay got me into enough trouble to make me promise myself that I wouldn’t write another. But inevitably, situations arose in which the effort of keeping quiet set up such a noise in my head, such an ache in my blood, that I succumbed, and wrote.”

Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy: Literature provides shelter. That's why we need it (abridged version of her PEN America Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture,) The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/13/arundhati-roy-literature-shelter-pen-america (13 May 2019)
Articles

Making love , Appearance , Effort

“In a situation like the one that prevails in Gujarat, when the police are reluctant to register firs, when the administration is openly hostile to those trying to gather facts, and when the killings go on unabated—then panic, fear and rumour play a pivotal role. People who have disappeared are presumed dead, people who have been dismembered and burnt cannot be identified, and people who are distraught and traumatised are incoherent…. This and other genuine errors in recounting the details of the violence in Gujarat in no way alters the substance of what journalists, fact-finding missions, or writers like myself are saying.”

Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy, To the Jaffri Family, An Apology . May 27, 2002 . Quoted from The God of false things : How Arundhati Roy creates fake news and gets away with it https://www.opindia.com/2017/05/the-god-of-false-things-how-arundhati-roy-creates-fake-news-and-gets-away-with-it/

Hostility , Dead , People , Way

“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

Arundhati Roy commenting on the Godhra train attack The God of false things : How Arundhati Roy creates fake news and gets away with it https://www.opindia.com/2017/05/the-god-of-false-things-how-arundhati-roy-creates-fake-news-and-gets-away-with-it/ also https://www.opindia.com/2019/04/urban-naxals-congress-hacks-and-eminent-historians-what-media-wont-tell-you-about-writers-who-signed-the-anti-modi-statement/ (Her statement was criticized as being counter-factual.)

Training

“I have always criticised violence in my speeches but the way the trouble in just two per cent of the area is blown up and used against us should be countered. Arundhati Roy paints Gujaratis as rapists and then goes scot-free by apologising. Isn't it an insult to Gujarat?”

Arundhati Roy

Narendra Modi Interview given to Rediff, "'The BJP is unstoppable'" http://www.rediff.com/news/2002/aug/27inter.htm (27 August 2002).

Way , Painting

“Are democratic governments accountable to the people who elected them? And, critically, is the public in democratic countries responsible for the actions...?”

Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy: Tide? Or Ivory Snow? Public Power in the Age of Empire, Speech, San Francisco, California https://www.democracynow.org/2004/8/23/public_power_in_the_age_of (16 August 2004)
Speeches

People , Country

“The question is: is “democracy” still democratic?”

Arundhati Roy

Speeches

Democracy , Question

“Recently, those who have criticized the actions of the U.S. government... have been called “anti-American.””

Arundhati Roy

..The term “anti-American” is usually used by the American establishment to discredit...its critics. Once someone is branded anti-American, the chances are that he or she will be judged before they are heard, and the argument will be lost in the welter of bruised national pride.<BR>But what does the term “anti-American” mean? Does it mean you are anti-jazz? Or... opposed to freedom of speech?...That you have a quarrel with giant sequoias? Does it mean that you don’t admire the hundreds of thousands of American citizens who marched against nuclear weapons, or the thousands... who forced their government to withdraw from Vietnam? Does it mean that you hate all Americans?<BR> This sly conflation of America’s culture, music, literature, the breathtaking physical beauty of the land, the ordinary pleasures of ordinary people with criticism of the U.S. government’s foreign policy (about which, thanks to America’s “free press”, sadly most Americans know very little) is... extremely effective strategy.<BR>To call someone “anti-American”, indeed to be anti-American, (or for that matter, anti-Indian or anti-Timbuktuan) is not just racist, it’s a failure of the imagination. An inability to see the world in terms other than those the establishment has set out for you... If you don’t love us, you hate us... If you’re not with us, you’re with the terrorists.

Come September, given at the Lensic Performing Arts Center, Santa Fe, NM, USA http://ada.evergreen.edu/~arunc/texts/politics/comeSeptember.pdf (29 Sep 2002).
Speeches

“It is like what I said, that the elite of the world have all seceded into outer space, and they have a country up there, and they look down and say, “What is our water doing in their rivers, and what’s our timber doing in their forests?””

Arundhati Roy

So there is a psychotic refusal to understand that the survival of the species is connected to the survival of the planet, you know? Because this sort of progress is a kind of church now. It is not amenable to reason. So it is very difficult to know how any real conversation can happen... <Br> A month or two ago, the Supreme Court of India...said that two million indigenous people should be evicted from their forest homes... Because that forest needs to be preserved as a sanctuary. But when, for the last 25 years, people were fighting against projects which were decimating millions of hectares and acres of forest, nobody cared... And when you are talking about evicting two million of the poorest people, stripping them of everything they ever had, there is little outrage. Any sense of talk of equality or justice seems to just have the same effect that blasphemy has in religious societies. That is what capitalism has become—a form of religion that will brook no questioning.

Democracy Now Arundhati Roy: Capitalism Is “a Form of Religion” Stopping Solutions to Climate Change & Inequality https://www.democracynow.org/2019/5/13/arundhati_roy_capitalism_is_a_form, (13 May 2019)
Interviews

World , Water , Country

“Can the hungry go on a hunger strike? Non-violence is a piece of theatre. You need an audience. What can you do when you have no audience? People have the right to resist annihilation.”

Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy: They are trying to keep me destabilised. Anybody who says anything is in danger https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jun/05/arundhati-roy-keep-destabilised-danger, (5 June 2011)
Articles, Interviews

Hunger , People

“Perhaps things will become worse and then better. Perhaps there’s a small god up in heaven readying herself for us. Another world is not only possible, she’s on her way. Maybe many of us won’t be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing.”

Arundhati Roy

Source: Articles, Come September (29 Sep 2002)

God , World , Way

“Fortunately, power has a shelf life. When the time comes, maybe this mighty empire will, like others before it, overreach itself and implode from within. It looks as though structural cracks have already appeared... America’s corporate heart is hemorrhaging.”

Arundhati Roy

Source: Articles, Come September (29 Sep 2002)

Appearance , Time , Heart , Life

“Wars are...usually fought for hegemony, for business. And then of course there’s the business of war...”

Arundhati Roy

Source: Articles, Come September (29 Sep 2002)