Arundhati Roy citations

“Il est capable de mettre au jour la douleur qui est au coeur du bonheur. (p.305)”

“Besoin inconscient chez l'homme de détruire ce qu'il ne peut ni soumettre ni adorer. (p.401)”

“L'enfance n'avait laissé sur eux aucune trace. Dépourvus de curiosité comme de doutes, ils étaient à leur manière terriblement adultes. (p.344)”

“Quand elles en eurent assez d'avoir attendu, les odeurs du dîner descendirent des rideaux et s'échappèrent par les fenêtres de l'hôtel pour aller danser sur la mer jusqu'au petit matin.”

“Quand par hasard elle changeait de chaîne, toutes ces famines, ces épidémies, ces guerres télévisuelles l'affolaient. (…) Elle considérait famines, génocides et purifications ethniques comme autant de phénomènes susceptibles de mettre son mobilier en péril.”

“La maladie, ce n’est pas le terrorisme, c’est l’extrême injustice”

“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.”

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

“Our dreams have been doctored. We belong no where. We sail unanchored on troubled seas. We may never be allowed ashore. Our sorrows will never be sad enough. Our joys never happy enough. Our dreams never big enough. Our lives never important enough. To matter..”

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

“Things can change in a day.”

“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.”

“I think that I was quite a grown-up child, and I have been a pretty childish adult.”

“D’you know what happens when you hurt people?’ Ammu said. ‘When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.”

“Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century. Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.”

“There is only one dream worth having…to live while you are alive, and die only when you are dead.”

“She was perhaps too young to realize that what she assumed was her love for [him] was actually a tentative, timorous, acceptance of herself.”

“You have come to a stage where you almost have to work on yourself. You know, on finding some tranquility with which to respond to these things, because I realize that the biggest risk that many of us run is beginning to get inured to the horrors.”

“The moment I saw her, a part of me walked out of my body and wrapped itself around her. And there it still remains.”

“One beach-colored.
One brown.
One Loved.
One Loved a Little Less.”

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

“And the air was full of Thoughts and Things to Say. But at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. Big Things lurk unsaid inside.”

“She wore flowers in her hair and carried magic secrets in her eyes. She spoke to no one. She spent hours on the riverbank. She smoked cigarettes and had midnight swims…”

“This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt.”

“Change is one thing. Acceptance is another.”

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

“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.”