May is a hot brooding month, not just in Ayemenem, but also in Nagpur. This evening, however, there is a promise of a cool, salubrious breeze It’s very easy to lapse into superlatives and hyperbole when the subject is someone with the incredible achievements of Ms Roy.[“The novelist who is the conscience of India”. Pankaj Mishra ‘Time’In early 1996, Arundhati Roy, then a screenwriter in Delhi, called me to say that she had written a novel. I can still remember my first enraptured reading of The God of Small Things. The novel seemed, in its evocations of the beauty and terror of life, its radical distrust of power, reflexive hatred of injustice and effervescent humor, almost miraculous. More remarkably, Roy’s subsequent nonfictional engagement with the conflicts and traumas of a heedlessly globalized world has manifested the virtues of an unflinching emotional as well as political intelligence. Her lucid and probing essays offer sharp insights on a range of matters, from crony capitalism and environmental depredation to the perils of nationalism and, in her most recent work, the insidiousness of the Hindu caste system. In an age of intellectual logrolling and mass-manufactured infotainment, she continues to offer bracing ways of seeing, thinking and feeling.”]

She extends and expands the scope of any debate, asks uncomfortable questions which force us to challenge our deep-rooted assumptions and mindsets. Whether it be America’s neo-imperialism, India’s pseudo-developmental model as epitomized by the Sardar Sarovar Project, its crony capitalism and corporatisation, its nuclear weaponization, the question of Kashmir’s independence, the questionable ‘justice’ meted out in the Indian parliamentary attack, Arundhati Roy always takes up positions that cock a snook at convention even at the risk of considerable personal peril. Roy insists that her writing is intentional in its passionate, hysterical tone: “I'm screaming from the bloody rooftops…. I want to wake up the neighbours, that's my whole point. I want everybody to open their eyes".

Vote of thanks: Ma’am, this 130 year old institution has played host to a number of illustrious names in the past, but we can safely claim that seldom has anyone augmented it with so much class, grace and originality. We pray and hope that you never run out of rooftops nor do we ever stop paying heed to

you, that the Veluthas of the small things do not die in vain, that the algbra of infinite justice finally finds a solution. For, one thing is always there, ‘Naaley – tomorrow’.-------------------------------------------------------------------- If you are religious, then remember that this bomb is Man's challenge to God. It's worded quite simply: We have the power to destroy everything that You have created. If you're not religious, then look at it this way. This world of ours is 4 600 000 000 years old. It could end in an afternoon. (The End of Imagination August, 1998 [1]) 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. (The Greater Common Good May, 1999 [2]) 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. (The Greater Common Good May, 1999 [3]) 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. (The Greater Common Good May, 1999 [4]) 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. (**Preface to The Cost of Living July 1999) 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. (The Algebra of Infinite Justice September 29, (2001) [5])The God of Small Things (1997) 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 ... ... the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones 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 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. ... Her own grief grieved her. His devastated her. (On Sophie Mol's death, describing Mamachi's grief, and Chacko's)Interviews 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. (From an interview with Andrew Denton on Enough Rope screened 18th October 2004 on ABC Australia [6])Speeches "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." From a speech entitled Come September "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?" From a speech entitled Come September There is only one dream worth having...to live while you are alive, and die only when you are dead. From a speech entitled Come September Literature is the opposite of a nuclear bomb. From a speech entitled Come September ... To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget. ... From the book "The cost of living" "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." A selection from a speech entitled Peace... given on November 7, 2004 while accepting the Sydney Peace Prize "Another world is not only possible, she's on the way and, on a quiet day, if you listen very carefully you can hear her breathe." (From a speech entitled Confronting Empire given at the World Social Forum in Porto Allegre, 28 January 2003) The tradition of "turkey pardoning" in the US is a wonderful allegory for new racism. Every year, the

National Turkey Federation presents the US president with a turkey for Thanksgiving. Every year, in a show of ceremonial magnanimity, the president spares that particular bird (and eats another one). After receiving the presidential pardon, the Chosen One is sent to Frying Pan Park in Virginia to live out its natural life. The rest of the 50 million turkeys raised for Thanksgiving are slaughtered and eaten on Thanksgiving Day. ConAgra Foods, the company that has won the Presidential Turkey contract, says it trains the lucky birds to be sociable, to interact with dignitaries, school children and the press. That's how new racism in the corporate era works. A few carefully bred turkeys - the local elites of various countries, a community of wealthy immigrants, investment bankers, the occasional Colin Powell, or Condoleezza Rice, some singers, some writers (like myself) - are given absolution and a pass to Frying Pan Park. The remaining millions lose their jobs, are evicted from their homes, have their water and electricity connections cut, and die of AIDS. Basically, they're for the pot. But the fortunate fowls in Frying Pan Park are doing fine. Some of them even work for the IMF and the World Trade Organisation - so who can accuse those organisations of being anti-turkey? Some serve as board members on the Turkey Choosing Committee - so who can say that turkeys are against Thanksgiving? They participate in it! Who can say the poor are anti-corporate globalisation? There's a stampede to get into Frying Pan Park. So what if most perish on the way? (From a speech given at the World Social Forum in Mumbai, 16 January 2004|2004) 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. (From a speech accepting the Sydney Peace Prize, November 07, 2004 [7]) 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." (On the American election, 2004 from her speech in San Francisco, California on August 16th, 2004 [8])---------------------------------------------------------------------Arundhati Roy quotes (showing 1-30 of 237)“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”― Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living “That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things “...the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones 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, The God of Small Things “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.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things “When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.”― Arundhati Roy “The only dream worth having is to dream that you will live while you are alive, and die only when you are dead. To love, to be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and vulgar disparity of the life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”― Arundhati Roy

“Change is one thing. Acceptance is another.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things “This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things “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 reconstitutred. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things “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.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”― Arundhati Roy “If you're happy in a dream, does that count?”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things “The way her body existed only where he touched her. The rest of her was smoke.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things “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.”― Arundhati Roy“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.The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”― Arundhati Roy, War Talk “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.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things “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...”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things “The American way of life is not sustainable. It doesn’t acknowledge that there is a world beyond America. ”― Arundhati Roy “There is a war that makes us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things “Things can change in a day.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things “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.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things “Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she came from poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace Worse Things kept happening”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things “I think that I was quite a grown-up child, and I have been a pretty childish adult.”― Arundhati Roy “Ammu said that human beings were creatures of habit, and it was amazing the kind of things one could get used to.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things “Some things come with their own punishments.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things “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.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things “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.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“Writers imagine that they cull stories from the world. I'm beginning to believe that vanity makes them think so. That it's actually the other way around. Stories cull writers from the world. Stories reveal themselves to us. The public narrative, the private narrative - they colonize us. They commission us. They insist on being told. Fiction and nonfiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons that I don't fully understand, fiction dances out of me, and nonfiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things102 likesLike“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 minds and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.”― Arundhati Roy, War Talk90 likesLike“Being with him made her 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 them like an opened frog on a dissecting table, begging to be examined.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“Insanity hovered close at hand, like an eager waiter at an expensive restaurant.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Thingstags: simile85 likesLike“Colorful demonstrations and weekend marches are vital but alone are not powerful enough to stop wars. Wars will be stopped only when soldiers refuse to fight, when workers refuse to load weapons onto ships and aircraft, when people boycott the economic outposts of Empire that are strung across the globe. ”― Arundhati Roy, Public Power in the Age of Empiretags: anti-imperialism, anti-war, civil-disobedience, non-violence, social-justice84 likesLike“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.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things77 likesLike“It was a time when the unthinkable became the thinkable and the impossible really happened”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things76 likesLike“Either way, change will come. It could be bloody, or it could be beautiful. It depends on us.”― Arundhati Roytags: change73 likesLike“Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Suddenly, they become the bleached bones of a story.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things70 likesLike“But when they made love he was offended by her eyes. They behaved as though they belonged to someone else. Someone watching. Looking out of the window at the sea. At a boat in the river. Or a passerby in the mist in a hat.

He was exasperated because he didn't know what that look meant. He put it somewhere between indifference and despair. He didn’t know that in some places, like the country that Rahel came from, various kinds of despair competed for primacy. And that personal despair could never be desperate enough. That something happened when personal turmoil dropped by at the wayside shrine of the vast, violent, circling, driving, ridiculous, insane, unfeasible, public turmoil of a nation. That Big God howled like a hot wind, and demanded obeisance. Then Small God (cozy and contained, private and limited) came away cauterized, laughing numbly at his own temerity. Inured by the confirmation of his own inconsequence, he became resilient and truly indifferent. Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered, the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she came from, poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace, Worse Things kept happening.

So Small God laughed a hollow laugh, and skipped away cheerfully. Like a rich boy in shorts. He whistled, kicked stones. The source of his brittle elation was the relative smallness of his misfortune. He climbed into people’s eyes and became an exasperating expression.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Thingstags: bigness, despair, desperation, exasperation, eyes, indifference, nationality, peace, personal, public, smallness, war67 likesLike“It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that is purloined. ”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things67 likesLike“Soviet-style communism failed, not because it was intrinsically evil, but because it was flawed. It allowed too few people to usurp too much power. Twenty-first century market capitalism, American-style, will fail for the same reasons. Both are edifices constructed by human intelligence, undone by human nature.”― Arundhati Roy63 likesLike“And there it was again. Another religion turned against itself. Another edifice constructed by the human mind, decimated by human nature.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things63 likesLike“There are things that you can't do - like writing letters to a part of yourself. To your feet or hair. Or heart.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things59 likesLike“Her grief grieved her. His devastated her.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things58 likesLike“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?”― Arundhati Roytags: desensitized, horror, humanity, terror, war, war-on-terror

58 likesLike“Pointed in the wrong direction, trapped outside their own history and unable to retrace their steps because their footprints had been swept away.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things52 likesLike“There's really no such thing as the 'voiceless'. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.”― Arundhati Roytags: subaltern51 likesLike“Smells, like music, hold memories. She breathed deep, and bottled it up for posterity.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things48 likesLike“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.”― Arundhati Roy45 likesLike“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.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Thingstags: love-hurts43 likesLike“As she watched him she understood the quality of his beauty. How his labor had shaped him. How the wood he fashioned had fashioned him. Each plank he planed, each nail he drove, each thing he made molded him. Had left its stamp on him. Had given him his strength, his supple grace.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things41 likesLike“And when we look in through the windows, all we see are shadows. And when we try and listen, all we hear is a whispering. And we cannot understand the whispering, because our minds have been invaded by a war. A war that we have both won and lost. The very worst sort of war. A war that captures

dreams and re-dreams them. A war that has made us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things41 likesLike“People always loved best what they identified most with.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things37 likesLike“So here we have it. The equivocating distinction between civilisation and savagery, between the "massacre of innocent people" or, if you like, "a clash of civilisations" and "collateral damage". The sophistry and fastidious algebra of infinite justice.”― Arundhati Roy36 likesLike“Anything's possible in Human Nature," Chacko said in his Reading Aloud voice. Talking to the darkness now, suddenly insensitive to his little fountain-haired niece. "Love. Madness. Hope. Infinite joy."Of the four things that were Possible in Human Nature, Rahel thought that Infinnate Joy sounded the saddest. Perhaps because of the way Chacko said it.Infinnate Joy. With a church sound to it. Like a sad fish with fins all over.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things35 likesLike“By then Esthappen and Rahel had learned that the world had other ways of breaking men. They were already familiar with the smell. Sicksweet. Like old roses on a breeze.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Thingstags: pg-835 likesLike“It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that it purloined. Over the years, as the memory of Sophie Mol ... slowly faded, the Loss of Sophie Mol grew robust and alive. It was always there. Like a fruit in season. Every season. As permanent as a government job.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things34 likesLike“When she looked at him now, she couldn't help thinking that the man he had become bore so little resemblance to the boy he had been. His smile was

the only piece of baggage he had carried with him from boyhood into manhood.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things33 likesLike“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.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Thingstags: beautiful, inspirational, music, witch32 likesLike“That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how.

And how much.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Thingstags: love32 likesLike“With the certitude of a true believer, Vellya Paapen had assured the twins that there was no such thing in the world as a black cat. He said that there were only black cat chaped holes in the universe.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things31 likesLike“Impelled by feelings that were primal yet paradoxically wholly impersonal. Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear--civilization's fear of nature, men's fear of women, power's fear of powerlessness. Man's subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“I do what I do, and write what I write, without calculating what is worth what and so on. Fortunately, I am not a banker or an accountant. I feel that there is a time when a political statement needs to be made and I make it.”― Arundhati Roy30 likesLike“A sparrow lay dead on the backseat. She had found her way through a hole in the windscreen, tempted by some seat-sponge for her nest. She never found her way out. No one noticed her

panicked car-window appeals. She died on the backseat, with her legs in the air. Like a joke.”― Arundhati Roy27 likesLike“Once the quietness arrived, it stayed and spread in Estha. It reached out of his head and enfolded him in its swampy arms. It rocked him to the rhythm of an ancient, fetal heartbeat. It sent its stealthy, suckered tentacles inching along the insides of his skull, hoovering the knolls and dells of his memory; dislodging old sentences, whisking them off the tip of his tongue. It stripped his thoughts of the words that described them and left them pared and naked. Unspeakable. Numb. And to an observer therefore, perhaps barely there. Slowly, over the years, Estha withdrew from the world. He grew accustomed to the uneasy octopus that lived inside him and squirted its inky tranquilizer on his past. Gradually the reason for his silence was hidden away, entombed somewhere deep in the soothing folds of the fact of it.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things27 likesLike“Biology designed the dance. Terror timed it. Dictated the rhythm with which their bodies answered each other. As though they already knew that for each tremor of pleasure they would pay with an equal measure of pain. As though they knew that how far they went would be measured against how far they would be taken.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things26 likesLike“When, as happened recently in France, an attempt is made to coerce women out of the burqa rather than creating a situation in which a woman can choose what she wishes to do, it’s not about liberating her, but about unclothing her. It becomes an act of humiliation and cultural imperialism. It’s not about the burqa. It’s about the coercion. Coercing a woman out of a burqa is as bad as coercing her into one. Viewing gender in this way, shorn of social, political and economic context, makes it an issue of identity, a battle of props and costumes. It is what allowed the US government to use western feminist groups as moral cover when it invaded Afghanistan in 2001. Afghan women were (and are) in terrible trouble under the Taliban. But dropping daisy-cutters on them was not going to solve their problems.”

― Arundhati Roytags: feminism, france, gender, islam, women25 likesLike“They would grow up grappling with ways of living with what happened. They would try to tell themselves that in terms of geological time it was an insignificant event. Just a blink of the Earth Woman's eye. That Worse Things had happened. That Worse Things kept happening. But they would find no comfort in the thought.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things24 likesLike“It's being made out that the whole point of the war was to topple the Taliban regime and liberate Afghan women from their burqas, we are being asked to believe that the U.S. marines are actually on a feminist mission.”― Arundhati Roy, Come Septembertags: arundhati, empire, hegemony, roy23 likesLike“Wars are never fought for altruistic reasons.”― Arundhati Roytags: altruism, armies, militarism, wars23 likesLike“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.”― Arundhati Roytags: failure, success21 likesLike“Must we behave like some damn godforsaken tribe that's just been discovered?”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things20 likesLike“I really worry about these political people that have no personal life. If there's nothing that's lovely, and if there's nothing that's just ephemeral, that you can just lie on the floor and bust a gut laughing at, then what's the point?”― Arundhati Roy20 likesLike“It is only now, these years later, that Rahel with adult hindsight recognized the sweetness of that gesture. A grown man entertaining three raccoons,

treating them like real ladies. Instinctively colluding in the conspiracy of their fiction, taking care not to decimate it with adult carelessness. Or affection.

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.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things20 likesLike“If you are happy in a dream, Ammu, does that count? Estha asked. "Does what count?" "The happiness does it count?". She knew exactly what he meant, her son with his spoiled puff. Because the truth is, that only what counts, counts....."If you eat fish in a dream, does it count?" Does it mean you've eaten fish?”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things20 likesLike“They all broke the rules. They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much. The laws that make grandmothers grandmothers, uncles uncles, mothers mothers, cousins cousins, jam jam, and jelly jelly.It was a time when uncles became fathers, mothers lovers, and cousins died and had funerals.It was a time when the unthinkable became thinkable and the impossible really happened.”― Arundhati Roytags: life, love, relations20 likesLike“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.”― Arundhati Roy20 likesLike“He held her as though she was a gift. Given to him in love. Something still and small. Unbearably precious.”― Arundhati Roy19 likesLike

“Humans are animals of habit.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things19 likesLike“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 that the establishment has set out for you: If you're not a Bushie you're a Taliban. If you don't love us, you hate us. If you're not Good you're Evil. If you're not with us, you're with the terrorists.”― Arundhati Roytags: anti-americanism, imagination, racism19 likesLike“May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things18 likesLike“Memory was that woman on the train. Insane in the way she sifted through dark things in a closet and emerged with the most unlikely ones - a fleeting look, a feeling. The smell of smoke. A windscreen wiper. A mother's marble eyes. Quite sane in the way she left huge tracts of darkness veiled. Unremembered.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things18 likesLike“He walked on water. Perhaps. But could he have *swum* on land? In matching knickers and dark glasses? With his Fountain in a Love-in-Tokyo? In pointy shoes and a puff? Would he have had the imagination?”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things17 likesLike“Madness slunk in through a chink in History. It only took a moment.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things17 likesLike“Ammu loved her children (of course), but their wide-eyed vulnerability and their willingness to love

people who didn't really love them exasperated her and sometimes made her want to hurt them-- just as an education, a precaution.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things16 likesLike“Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s minds & then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.”― Arundhati Roy15 likesLike“One beach-colored.One brown.One Loved.One Loved a Little Less.”― Arundhati Roytags: rahel, sophie-mol, the-god-of-small-things14 likesLike“Flat muscled and honey coloured. Sea secrets in his eyes. A silver raindrop in his ear.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Thingstags: imagination, love, thoughts14 likesLike“To call someone 'anti-American', indeed, to be anti-American, is not just racist, it's a failure of the imagination.”― Arundhati Roy14 likesLike“Some things come with their own punishments. Like bedrooms with built-in cupboards. They would all learn more about punishments soon. That they came in different sizes. That some were so big they were like cupboards with built-in bedrooms. You could spend your whole life in them, wandering through dark shelving.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things14 likesLike“I'm trained as an architect; writing is like architecture. In buildings, there are design motifs that occur again and again, that repeat -- patterns, curves. These motifs help us feel comfortable in a physical space. And the same works in writing, I've found. For me, the way words, punctuation and paragraphs fall on the page is important as well -- the graphic design of the language. That was why the words and thoughts of Estha and Rahel, the twins, were so playful on the page ... I was being

creative with their design. Words were broken apart, and then sometimes fused together. "Later" became "Lay. Ter." "An owl" became "A Nowl." "Sour metal smell" became "sourmetal smell."

Repetition I love, and used because it made me feel safe. Repeated words and phrases have a rocking feeling, like a lullaby. They help take away the shock of the plot -- death, lives destroyed or the horror of the settings -- a crazy, chaotic, emotional house, the sinister movie theater.”― Arundhati Roy “Another world is not only possible, she is 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, War Talk

“The first step towards reimagining a world gone terribly wrong would be to stop the annihilation of those who have a different imagination- an imagination that is outside of capitalism as well as communism. An imagination which has an altogether different understanding of what constitutes happiness and fulfilment. To gain this philosophical space, it is necessary to concede some physical space for survival of those who may look like the keepers of our past but who may really be the guides to our future. To do this we have to ask our rulers: Can you leave the water in the rivers, the trees in the forest? Can you leave the bauxite in the mountain?”― Arundhati Roy, Broken Republic: Three Essays13 likesLike“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.”― Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Livingtags: alive, carpe-diem, dead, death, dream, dying, existing, life, life-and-death, living, reality, truths13 likesLike“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…”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Thingstags: civilization, earth, humans12 likesLike“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..”― Arundhati Roy12 likesLike“ الحياة نهاية فقط ، الموت ليس !”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things12 likesLike“She had never before met a man who spoke of the world—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 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 them like an opened frog on a dissecting table, begging to be examined.In the year she knew them, before they were married, she discovered a little magic in herself, and for a while felt like a blithe genie released from her lamp. She was perhaps too young to realize that what she assumed was her love for Chacko was actually a tentative, timorous, acceptance of herself.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things12 likesLike“When she looked at herself in her wedding photographs, Ammu felt the woman that looked back at her was someone else. A foolish jewelled bride. Her silk sunset-coloured sari shot with gold. Rings on every finger. White dots of sandalwood paste over her arched eye-brows. Looking at herself like this, Ammu's soft mouth would twist into a

small, bitter smile at the memory - not of the wedding itself so much as the fact that she had permitted herself to be so painstakingly decorated before being led to the gallows. It seemed so absurd. So futile.Like polishing firewood.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things12 likesLike“Oddly enough, it was he who had introduced the twins to Kathakali...He is searching for the beast that lives within him, Comrade Pillai had told them - frightened, wide-eyed children - when the ordinarily good natured Bhima began to bay and snarl.Which beast in particular, Comrade Pillai didn't say. Searching for the Man who lives in him was perhaps what he really meant, because certainly no beast has essayed the boundless, infinitely inventive art of human hatred. No beast can match its range and power. ”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things12 likesLike“The [Booker] prize was actually responsible in many ways for my political activism. I won this thing and I was suddenly the darling of the new emerging Indian middle class – they needed a princess. They had the wrong woman. I had this light shining on me at the time, and I knew that I had the stage to say something about what was happening in my country. What is exciting about what I have done since is that writing has become a weapon, some kind of ammunition.”― Arundhati Roy11 likesLike“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.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Thingstags: rain11 likesLike“Anyway, now she thinks of Estha and Rahel as Them, because, separately, the two of them are no longer what They were or ever thought They would be.Ever.

Their lives have a size and a shape now. Estha has his and Rahel hers.Edges, Borders, Boundaries, Brinks and Limits have appeared like a team of trolls on their separate horizons. Short creatures with long shadows, patrolling the Blurry End. Gentle half-moons have gathered under their eyes and they are as old as Ammu was when she died.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things11 likesLike“What came for them? Not death. Just the end of living.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things11 likesLike“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.”― Arundhati Roytags: anger, corporations, missionaries, neoliberalism, ngos10 likesLike“History was like an old house at night. With all the lamps lit. And ancestor whispering inside. To understand history, we have to go inside and listen to what they're saying. And look at the books and the pictures on the wall. And smell the smells.”― Arundhati Roy10 likesLike“… he remained restrained and strangely composed. It was a composure born of extreme provocation. It stemmed from a lucidity that lies beyond rage.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things10 likesLike“How carelessly imperial power vivisected ancient civilizations. Palestine and Kashmir are imperial Britain's festering,blood-drenched gifts to the modem world. Both are fault lines in the raging international con�icts of today.”― Arundhati Roy10 likesLike“To understand history,' Chacko said, 'we have to go inside and listen to what they're saying. And look

at the books and the pictures on the wall. And smell the smells.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Thingstags: history9 likesLike“...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.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Thingstags: fate, love, love-laws9 likesLike“Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.”― Arundhati Roytags: authors, fiction, non-fiction, stories, writing9 likesLike“See, ma'am, frankly speaking this problem can't be solved by us police or military. The problem with these tribals is they don't understand greed. Unless they become greedy there's no hope for us. I have told my boss, remove the force and instead put a TV in every home. Everything will be automatically sorted out.”― Arundhati Roy, Broken Republic: Three Essays9 likesLike

“Rahel’s toy wristwatch had the time painted on it. Ten to two. One of her ambitions was to own a watch on which she could change the time whenever she wanted to (which according to her was what Time was meant for in the first place).”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things9 likesLike“His gratitude widened his smile and bent his back.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Thingstags: gratitude, smile8 likesLike“Humbling was a nice word, Rahel thought. Humbling along without a care in the world”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things8 likesLike“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. When independent-thinking people (and here I do not include the corporate media) begin to rally under flags, when writers, painters, musicians, film makers suspend their judgment and blindly yoke their art to the service of the “Nation,” it’s time for all of us to sit up and worry.”― Arundhati Roy8 likesLike“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.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Thingstags: courage, dreams, love, lust, passion, sex8 likesLike“Old. A viable die-able age.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things8 likesLike“She viewed ethnic cleansing, famine and genocide as direct threats to her furniture.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Thingstags: ethnic-cleansing, famine, genocide7 likesLike“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. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling — their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.”― Arundhati Roy7 likesLike“ .باحالمنا التالعب تم لقد اي الى ننتمي ال نحن

متالطمه بحار في رسو دون نبحر نحن.مكان .ً لنا اليُسمح وقد لن أشجاننا.الشاطئ إلى بالتوجه أبدا

كفاية حزينة تكون .تكون لن وحيواتنا.كفاية سعيدة تكون لن أفراحنا

لتؤثّر.كفاية مهمة ”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things7 likesLike“They were not friends, Comdrade Pillai and Inspector Thomas Matthew, 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 into the world and never wondered how it worked, because they knew. They worked it. They were mechanics who serviced different parts of the same machine.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“Margaret Kochamma's tiny, ordered life relinquished itself to this truly baroque bedlam with the quiet gasp of a warm body entering a chilly sea.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things7 likesLike“..and in the background, the constant, high, whining mewl of local disapproval. Within the first few months of her return, to her parents' home, Ammy quickly learned to recognize and despise the ugly face of sympathy. Old female relations with incipient beards and several wobbling chins made overnight trips to Ayemenem to commiserate with her about her divorce. They squeezed her knee and gloated. She fought off the urge to slap them. Or twiddle their nipples. With a spanner. Like Chaplin in Modern Times.When she looked at herself in her wedding photographs, Ammu felt the woman that looked back at her was someone else. A foolish jeweled

bride. Her silk sunset-colored sari shot with gold. Rings on very finger. White dots of sandalwood paste over her arched eye-brows. Looking at herself like this, Ammu's soft mouths would twist into a small, bitter, smile at the memory - not of the wedding itself so much as the fact that she had permitted herself to be so painstakingly decorated before being led to the gallows. It seemed so absurd. So futile.Like polishing firewood........Ammu knew that weddings were not something that could be avoided altogether. At least not practically speaking. But for the rest of her life she advocated small weddings in ordinary clothes. it made them less ghoulish, she thought.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things7 likesLike“The twins were too young to know that these were only history’s henchmen. Sent to square the books and collect the dues from those who broke its laws. Impelled by feelings that were primal yet paradoxically wholly impersonal. Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear—civilization’s fear of nature, men’s fear of women, power’s fear of powerlessness. Man’s subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Thingstags: civilisation, history, human-nature, psychology6 likesLike“The strange thing about Roman soldiers in the comics was the amount of trouble they took over their armor and their helmets, and then, after all that, they left their legs bare. It didn't make any sense at all. Weatherwise or otherwise.”― Arundhati Roy6 likesLike“It was a grand old house, the Ayemenem House, but aloof-looking. As though it had little to do with the people who lived in it. Like an old man with rheumy eyes watching children play, seeing only transience in their shrill elation and their whole-hearted commitment to life.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things6 likesLike“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?”― Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Livingtags: capitalism, cities, colonialism, exploitation, first-world, human-rights, humanity, international-authors, international-relations, manipulation, nature, third-world, women6 likesLike“They visited him in saris, clumping gracelessly through red mud and long grass ... and introduced themselves as Mrs. Pillai, Mrs. Eapen and Mrs. Rajagopalan. Velutha introduced himself and his paralyzed brother Kuttappen (although he was fast asleep). He greeted them with the utmost courtesy. He addressed them all as Kochamma [an honorific title for a woman] and gave them fresh coconut water to drink. He chatted to them about the weather. The river. The fact that in his opinion coconut trees were getting shorter by the year. As were the ladies in Ayemenem. He introduced them to his surly hen. He showed them his carpentry tools, and whittled them each a little wooden spoon.

It is only now, these years later, that Rahel with adult hindsight recognized the sweetness of that gesture. A grown man entertaining three raccoons, treating them like real ladies. Instinctively colluding in the conspiracy of their fiction, taking care not to decimate it with adult carelessness. Or affection. [emphasis mine]

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.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Thingstags: education, imagination, love, make-believe, parenting6 likesLike“Here they learned to Wait. To Watch. To think thoughts and not voice them.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things6 likesLike

“At times there's something so precise and mathematically chilling about nationalism.

Build a dam to take away water AWAY from 40 million people. Build a dam to pretend to BRING water to 40 million people. Who are these gods that govern us? Is there no limit to their powers?”― Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Livingtags: arundhati-roy, capitalism, corporations, dam, economics, environmental-degradation, equality, exploitation, false-gods, government, government-corruption, human-rights, india, inspirational, narmada-valley, nationalism, reality, truth, women6 likesLike“It is such a supreme folly to believe that nuclear weapons are deadly only if they're used. The fact that they exist at all, their presence in our lives, will wreak more havoc than we can begin to fathom. Nuclear weapons pervade our thinking. Control our behavior. Administer our societies. Inform our dreams. They bury themselves like meat hooks deep in the base of our brains. They are purveyors of madness. They are the ultimate colonizer. Whiter than any white man that ever lived. The very heart of whiteness.”― Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Livingtags: colonialism, colonizer, danger, fear, folly, humanity, humans, madness, mind-control, nuclear-bomb, nuclear-threat, nuclear-weapons, truth, white, whiteness6 likesLike“But can we, should we, let apprehensions about the future immobilize us in the present?”― Arundhati Roy, Broken Republic: Three Essaystags: action, fear, future, present5 likesLike“Anti-Americanism is in the process of being consecrated into an ideology.

The term 'anti-American' is usually used by the American establishment to discredit and, not falsely -- but shall we say inaccurately -- define its critics. Once someone is branded anti-American, the chances are that he or she will be judged before they're heard and the argument will be lost in the welter of bruised national pride.

What does the term 'anti-American' mean? Does it mean you're anti-jazz? Or that you're opposed to

free speech? That you don't delight in Toni Morrison or John Updike? That you have a quarrel with giant sequoias? Does it mean 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? .....

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 that the establishment has set out for you: If you're not a Bushie you're a Taliban. If you don't love us, you hate us. If you're not good you're evil. If you're not with us, you're with the terrorists.”― Arundhati Roy, War Talk “It wasn't what lay at the end of her road that frightened Ammu as much as the nature of the road itself. No milestones marked its progress. No trees grew along it. No dappled shadows shaded it. No mists rolled over it. No birds circled it. No twists, no turns or hairpin bends obscured even momentarily, her clear view of the end. This filled Ammu with an awful dread, because she was not the kind of woman who wanted her future told. She dreaded it too much. So if she were granted one small wish perhaps it would have been Not to Know, Not to know what each day hed in store for her. Not to know where she might be, next month, next year. Ten years on. Not to know which way her road might turn and what lay beyond the bend.”― Arundhati Roy “When Khubchand, his beloved, blind, bald, incontinent seventeen-year-old mongrel, decided to stage a miserable, long-drawn-out death, Estha nursed him through his final ordeal as though his own life somehow depended on it. In the last months of his life, Khubchand, who had the best of intentions but the most unreliable of bladders, would drag himself to the top-hinged dog-flap built into the bottom of the door that led out into the back garden, push his head through it and urinate unsteadily, bright yellowly, inside Then with bladder empty and conscience clear he would look up at Estha with opaque green eyes that stood in his grizzled skull like scummy pools and weave his way back to his damp cushion, leaving wet footprints on the floor. As Khubchand lay dying on his cushion, Estha could see the bedroom window reflected in

his smooth, purple balls. And the sky beyond. And once a bird that flew across. To Estha - steeped in the smell of old roses, blooded on memories of a broken man - the fact that something so fragile, so unbearably tender had survived, had been allowed to exist, was a miracle. A bird in flight reflected in an old dog's balls. It made him smile out loud.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things “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.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things “It didn't matter that the story had begun, because kathakali discovered long ago that the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones that you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don't decieve 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 the 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, and who doesn't. And yet you want to know again.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things “Chacko had been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and was permitted excesses and eccentricities nobody else was. He claimed to be writing a Family Biography that the Family would have to pay him not to publish. Ammu said that there was only one person in the family who was a fit candidate for

biographical blackmail and that was Chacko himself.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things “Neither question nor answer was meant as anything more than a polite preamble to conversation.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things “[Internationa] Aid is just another praetorian business enterprise.”― Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living“In those early amorphous years when memory had only just begun, when life was full of Beginnings and no Ends, and Everything was Forever, Esthappen and Rahel thought of themselves together as Me, and separately, individually, as We or Us. As though they were a rare breed of Siamese twins, physically separate, but with joint identities.”― Arundhati Roy “Outside, the Air was Alert and Bright and Hot... She could see the pattern of the cross-stitch flowers from the blue cross-stitch counterpane on Ammu's cheek. She could hear the blue cross-stitch afternoon.The slow ceiling fan.The sun behind the curtains.The yellow wasp wasping against the windowpane in a dangerous dzzzzzzzzzzzz.A disbelieving lizard's blink.High-stepping chickens in the yard.The sound of the sun crinkling the washing.Crisping white bed-sheets. Stiffened starched saris. Off white and gold.Red ants on yellow stones.A hot cow feeling hot. Ahmoo in the distance.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things“...although you know that one day you will die, you live as if you won't.”― Arundhati Roy “Though the rain washed Mammachi’s spit off his face, it didn’t stop the feeling that somebody had lifted off his head and vomited into his body. Lumpy vomit dribbling down his insides. Over his heart. His lungs. The slow thick drip into the pit of his stomach. All his organs awash in vomit. There was nothing the rain could do about that. ”― Arundhati Roy “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.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things“She was perhaps too young to realize that what she assumed was her love for [him] was actually a tentative, timorous, acceptance of herself.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things“Never counted in the "costs" of war are the dead birds, the charred animals the murdered fish, incinerated insects, poisoned water sources, destroyed vegetation. Rarely mentioned is the arrogance of the human race toward other living things with which it shares this planet. All these are forgotten in the fight for markets and ideologies. This arrogance will probably be the ultimate undoing of the human species.”― Arundhati Roy, War Talk “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.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Thingstags: crime, irony, justice, punishment “He couldn't see her, sitting outside in the darkness, looking in at the light. A pair of actors trapped in a recondite play with no hint of plot or narrative. Stumbiling through their parts nursing someone else’s sorrow. Grieving someone else’s grief. Unable somehow to change plays. Or purchase, for a fee some cheap brand of exorcism from a conveyor with a fancy degree, who would sit them down and say in one of many ways: “ Your not the sinners. You’re the sinned against. You were only children.You had no control. You are the victims, not the perpetrators.” It would of helped if they could of made that crossing. If only they could have worn, even temporarily, the tragic hood of victim hood”

― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things “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 Cost of Living “Some days he walked along the banks of the river that smelled of shit and pesticides bought with World Bank loans.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things “They looked cheerful in the photograph, Lenin and his wife. As though they had a new refrigerator in their drawing room, and a down payment on a DDA flat.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things “His eyes were polite yet maleficent, as though he was making an effort to be civil to the photographer while plotting to murder his wife.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things “The fact that something so fragile, so unbearably tender had survived, had been allowed to exist, was a miracle.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things “The trees were still green, the sky still blue, which counted for something. So they went ahead and plugged their smelly paradise - God's Own Country they called it in their brochures - because they knew, those clever Hotel People, that smelliness, like other peoples' poverty, was merely a matter of getting used to. A question of discipline. Of Rigor and Air-conditioning. Nothing more.”― Arundhati Roy3 likesLike“Беше малко хладен. Малко влажен. Малко тих. Въздухът.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things3 likesLike“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.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things “The sky was thick with TV. If you wore special glasses you could see them spinning through the sky among the bats and homing birds—blondes, wars, famines, football, food shows, coups d'état, hairstyles stiff with hair spray. Designer pectorals. Gliding towards Ayemenem like skydivers. Making patterns in the sky. Wheels. Windmills. Flowers blooming and unblooming.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things“Red ants that had a sour farty smell when they were squashed.”― Arundhati Roy “Baby Kochamma had installed a dish antenna on the roof of the Ayemenem house. She presided over the world in her drawing room on satellite TV. The impossible excitement that this engendered in Baby Kochamma wasn’t hard to understand. It wasn’t something that happened gradually. It happened overnight. Blondes, wars, famines, football, sex, music, coups d’etat—they all arrived on the same train. They unpacked together. They stayed at the same hotel. And in Ayemenem, where once the loudest sound had been a musical bus horn, now whole wars, famines, picturesque massacres and Bill Clinton could be summoned up like servants.” ― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things “From now on it is not dying we must fear, but living.”― Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Livingtags: dying, existential-horror, existentialism, fear, humans, living, nuclear-weapons “They were all there (at the airport) - the deaf ammoomas, the cantankerous, arthritic appoopas, the pining wives, scheming uncles, children with the runs. The fiancées to be reassessed. The teacher's husband still waiting for his Saudi visa. The teacher's husband's sisters waiting for their dowries. The wire-bender's pregnant wife. "Mostly sweeper class," Baby Kochamma said grimly, and looked away while a mother, no wanting to give up her good place near the railing, aimed her distracted baby's penis into an empty bottle while he smiled and waved at the people around him...”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things “Debating Imperialism is a bit like debating the pros and cons of rape. What can we say? That we really miss it?”

― Arundhati Roy, An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empiretags: colonialism, imperialism2 likesLike“There is a notion gaining credence that the free market breaks down national barriers, and that corporate globalization's ultimate destination is a hippie paradise where the heart is the only passport and we all live together happily inside a John Lennon song (Imagine there's no country...). This is a canard.”― Arundhati Roy, War Talk “(a) Going to Oxford didn't necessarily make a person clever.

(b) Cleverness didn't necessarily make a good prime minister.(c) If a person couldn't even run a pickle factory profitably, how was that person going to run a whole country?And, most important of all:(d) All Indian mothers are obsessed with their sons and are therefore poor judges of their abilities.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things “Rahel thought of the someone who had taken the trouble to go up there with cans of paint, white for the clouds, blue for the sky, silver for the jets, and brushes, and thinner.” ― Arundhati Roy “When you recreate the image of man, why repeat God's mistakes?” ― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things “When the twins asked what cuff-links were for—“To link cuffs together,” Ammu told them—they were thrilled by this morsel of logic in what had so far seemed an illogical language. Cuff+link = cuff-link. This, to them, rivaled the precision of logic and mathematics. Cuff-links gave them an inordinate (if exaggerated) satisfaction, and a real affection for the English language.” ― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things “Let's leave one alive so that it can be lonely.” ― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things “Perverted quality; Moral perversion; The innate corruption of human nature due to original sin; Both the elect and the non-elect came into the world in a state of total d. and alienation from God, and can, of themselves do nothing but sin. J.H. Blunt.” ― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things “There are things that can be forgotten. And things that cannot - that sit on dusty shelves like stuffed

birds with baleful, sideways staring eyes.” ― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things “On bad days the orange walls held hands and bent over him, inspecting him, like malevolent doctors, slowly, deliberately, squeezing the breath out of him and making him scream. Sometimes they receded of their own accord, and the room he lay in grew impossibly large, terrorizing him with the specter of his own insignificance. That too made him cry out.” ― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things “He gathered her into the cave of his body." (Roy,338)” ― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things “…imagine that the earth—four thousand six hundred million years old—[were] a forty-six-year-old woman…. It had taken the whole of the 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 eleven years 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 eight months ago—when dinosaurs roamed the earth. The whole of human civilization as we know it began only two hours ago in the Earth Woman’s life…. It was an awe-inspiring and humbling thought…that the whole of contemporary history, the World Wars, the War of Dreams, the Man on the Moon, science, literature, philosophy, the pursuit of knowledge—was no more than a blink of the Earth Woman’s eye.” ― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things “Searching for the Man who lives in him was perhaps what he really meant, because certainly no beast has essayed the boundless, infinitely inventive art of human hatred. No beast can match its range and power.” ― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things “On Rahel's heart Pappachi's moth snapped open its somber wings. Out. In. And lifted its legs. Up. Down.” ― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things “Do we need weapons to fight wars? Or do we need wars to create markets for weapons?” ― Arundhati Roy, Capitalism: A Ghost Story“A fee clarified things. Disjuncted sex from love. Needs from feelings.” ― Arundhati Roy“They were not friends, Comrade Pillai and Inspector Thomas Mathew, and they didn't trust 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 same machine.” ― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things“Ammu's tears made everything that had so far seemed unreal, real.” ― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things “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.” ― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things“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.”― Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living“Ammu watched over them fiercely. Her watchfulness stretched her, made her taut and tense. She was quick to reprimand her children, but even quicker to take offense on their behalf.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things “[b.] be prepared to be prepared.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things1 likes “Et tu, Caesar? Then fall, Caesar.Et tu, Estha? Then fall, Estha.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things“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.”― Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living “Chacko marvelled at how someone so small and undefined, so vague in her resemblances,could so completely command the attention, the love, the sanity, of a grown man.”― Arundhati Roy “Ammu," Chako said, his voice steady and deliberately casual, "is it at all possible for you to

prevent your washed-up cynicism from completely coloring everything?"Silence filled the car like a saturated sponge. 'Washed-up' cut like a knife through a soft 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, The God of Small Things “And on Ammu's road (to Age and Death) a small, sunny meadow appeared. Copper grass spangled with blue butterflies. Beyond it, an abyss.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Thingstags: life “Capitalism is destroying the planet. The two old tricks that dug it out of past crises--War and Shopping--simply will not work.”― Arundhati Roy, Capitalism: A Ghost Storytags: capitalism, corporations, environment, war “I love the unanswered question, the unresolved story, the unclimbed mountain, the tender shard of an incomplete dream. Most of the time. But is it mandatory for a writer to be ambiguous about everything? Isn't it true that there have been fearful episodes in human history when prudence and discretion would have just been euphemisms for pusillanimity? When caution was actually cowardice? When sophistication was disguised decadence? When circumspection was really a kind of espousal? Isn't it true, or at least theoretically possible, that there are times in the life of a people or a nation when the political climate demands that we—even the most sophisticated of us—overtly take sides? I think such times are upon us.”― Arundhati Roy, Power Politics “She wore flowers in her hair and carried magic secrets in her eyes. She spoke to no one. She spent hours on the riverbank and had midnight swims.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things “Revolutions can, and often have, begun with reading.The Doctor and the Saint”― Arundhati Roy “In a determined reversal of her inherent nature, Kochu Maria now, as a policy, hardly ever believed anything that anybody said.”― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things“Now they were old.Old enough.A viable, die-able age.”― Arundhati Roy