Quotes by Arundhati Roy

Thats what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.

We ought not to speak only about the economics of globalization, but about the psychology of globalization. Its like the psychology of a battered woman being faced with her husband again and being asked to trust him again. Thats 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.

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

Only that once again they broke the Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much.

To fuel yet another war this time against Iraq by cynically manipulating peoples 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.

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

To call someone anti-American, indeed, to be anti-American, (or for that matter anti-Indian, or anti-Timbuktuan) is not just racist, its a failure of the imagination. An inability to see the world in terms other than those that the establishment has set out for you: If youre not a Bushie youre a Taliban. If you dont love us, you hate us. If youre not Good youre Evil. If youre not with us, youre with the terrorists.

Ridges of muscle on his stomach rose under his skin like divisions on a slab of chocolate. He held her close by the light of an oil lamp, and he shone as though he had been polished with a high-wax body polish.

The two men had a conversation. Brief, cryptic, to the point. As though they had exchanged numbers and not words. No explanations seemed necessary. They were not friends, Comrade Pillai and Inspector Thomas Mathew, and they didn’t trust each other. But they understood each other perfectly. They were both men whom childhood had abandoned without a trace. Men without curiosity. Without doubt. Both in their own way truly, terrifyingly adult. They looked out at the world and never wondered how it worked, because they knew. They worked it. They were mechanics who serviced different parts of the machine.

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

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.

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

I see a role for specialized knowledge, but I think that its important for there to be an arena where it is shared, where it is communicated. Its not that somebody shouldnt have specialized knowledge. The ability to dig a trench and lay a cable is a kind of specialized knowledge. Farmers have specialized knowledge, too. The question is: what sort of knowledge is privileged in our societies? I dont think that a CEO is more valuable to society and ought to be paid ten million dollars a year, while farmers and laborers starve.The range of what is valued has become so extreme that one lot of people have captured it and left three-quarters of the world to live in unthinkable poverty, because their work is not valued. What would happen if the sweepers of the city went on strike or the sewage system didnt work? A CEO wouldnt be able to deal with his own shit.

Glanced up and caught Ammus 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 hadnt seen before. Things that had been out of bounds so far, obscured by histors 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. Historys 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.

In India were fighting to retain a wilderness that we have. Whereas in the west, its gone. Every person thats walking down the street is a walking bar code. You can tell where their clothes are from, how much they cost, which designer made which shoe, which shop you bought each item from. Everything is civilized and tagged and valued and numbered and put in its place. Whereas in India, the wilderness still exists-the unindoctrinated wilderness of the mind, full of untold secrets and wild imaginings.

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.

NGOs have a complicated space in neoliberal politics. They are supposed to mop up the anger. Even when they are doing good work, they are supposed to maintain the status quo. They are the missionaries of the corporate world.

Sitting next to Tilo, breathing next to her, he felt like an empty house whose locked windows and doors were creaking open a little, to air the ghosts trapped inside it.

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...

[Internationa] Aid is just another praetorian business enterprise.