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Famous Arundhati Roy Quotes

“When those who had been evicted went back to where they came from, they found their villages had disappeared under great dams and dusty quarries. Their homes were occupied by hunger-and policemen. The forests were filling up with armed guerrillas. They found that the wars from the edge of India, in Kashmir, Nagaland, Manipur, had migrated to its heart. People returned to live on city streets and pavements, in hovels on dusty construction sites, wondering which corner of this huge country was meant for them.”

WarDisplacementEconomic Inequality
Book:Capitalism: A Ghost Story
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“Velutha looked down at Ambassador Insect in his arms He put her down. Shaking too. "And look at you!" he said, looking at her ridiculous frothy frock "So beautiful! Getting married?" Rahel lunged at his armpits and tickled him mercilessly. Ickilee ickilee ickilee! "I saw you yesterday," she said. "Where?" Velutha made his voice high and surprised. "Liar" Rahel said. "Liar and pretender. I did see you. You were a Communist and had a shirt and a flag. And you ignored me." "Aiyyo kashtam," Velutha said. "Would I do that? You tell me, would Velutha ever do that? It must've been my Long-lost Twin brother." "Which Long-lost Twin brother?" "Urumban, silly... The one who lives in Kochi." "Who Urumban?" Then she saw the twinkle. "Liar! You haven't got a Twin brother! It wasn't Urumban! It was you!" Velutha laughed. He had a lovely laugh that he really meant "Wasn't me," he said. "I was sick in bed." "See, you’re smiling!" Rahel said. "That means it was you Smiling means 'It was you.'" "That's only in English'’ Velutha said. "In Malayalam my teacher always said that 'Smiling means it wasn’t me.'" It took Rahel a moment to sort that one out. She lunged at him once again. Ickilee ickilee ickilee! (169(”

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Book:The God of Small Things
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“In Kottayam there were deep undercurrents of local tension that they weren’t aware of. The Marxist government in Kerala was unhappy with the book for what it considered to be unacceptable criticism of the party and its legendary leader, E. M. S. Namboodiri -pad, who was the frst Communist chief minister of Kerala. I was an admirer, but not a devotee. The criticism in The God of Small Things had to do with the party’s attitude to caste. I was denounced as anti- communist (though nothing could be further from the truth) and for a while there was some talk of banning the book.”

CommunismPretenseKeralaLeftist Tripe
Book:Mother Mary Comes to Me
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“Given our remote location, logistics were a nightmare. We were ambushed with new problems almost every hour. We did not have the budget  –  the luxury hotel rooms or great catering or frequent of- days –  to lubricate the bone- on- bone clashes that erupted with sickening regularity. Eventually, civilization broke down in the jungle. The savage spirit of the script spilled of the pages and came to haunt us on the sets. The white crew turned into the truculent jungle- lodge guests, unhappy with the service they were receiving. We became the irreverent staf, doing what we had to, but mocking them behind their backs. Somehow, we held it together and fnished flming. This time, unlike in Annie , there was a diference between how Pradip visualized the flm and how I imagined it. His approach, with the actors as well as the staging, was gentle, realistic, poker- faced. He softened the savagery and the occasional vulgarity of the script. I thought it ought to be enhanced, lifted half an inch of the foor. I wanted it to have a slightly surreal, merciless, metallic quality.”

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Book:Mother Mary Comes to Me
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“Las Grandes Historias son aquellas que ya se han oído y se quiere oír otra vez. Aquellas a las que se puede entrar por cualquier puerta y habitar en ellas cómodamente. No engañan con emociones o finales falsos. No sorprenden con imprevistos. Son tan conocidas como la casa en la que se vive. O el olor de la piel del ser amado. Sabemos cómo acaban y, sin embargo, las escuchamos como si no lo supiéramos. Del mismo modo que, aun sabiendo que un día moriremos, vivimos como si fuéramos inmortales. En las Grandes Historias sabemos quién vive, quién muere, quién encuentra el amor y quién no. Y, aun así, queremos volver a saberlo.”

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Book:The God of Small Things
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“Any government's condemnation of terrorism is only credible if it shows itself to be responsive to persistent, reasonable, closely argued, non-violent dissent. And yet, what's happening is just the opposite. The world over, non-violent resistance movements are being crushed and broken. If we do not respect and honour them, by default we privilege those who turn to violent means.”

DemocracyProtestFreedom Of SpeechDissentPeaceful ProtestArundhati RoyOn Terrorism
Author:Arundhati Roy
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“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.”

HistoryHypocrisyColonialismWestern CivilizationPostcolonialismInternational DevelopmentWestern HypocrisyEuropean CivilizationWestern HistoryPost Colonial TheoryThird World Feminism
Book:The cost of living
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“In order to detach caste from the political economy, from conditions of enslavement in which most dalits lived and worked, in order to slide the questions of entitlement, land reforms and the redistribution of wealth, Hindu reformers cleverly narrowed the question of caste to the issue of untouchability. They framed it as an erroneous religious and cultural practice that needed to be reformed.”

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Book:The Doctor and the Saint: The Ambedkar - Gandhi Debate
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“- Si on est heureux pendant un rêve, Ammu, est-ce que ça compte? demanda Estha. - Qu'est-ce qui compte? - Le bonheur en rêve, est-ce qu'il compte, comme le vrai? Elle savait exactement ce qu'il voulait dire, son fils avec sa banane écrasée. Parce que, à vrai dire, seul ce qui compte est à prendre en compte. Sagesse naïve, incontournable, des enfants. Si on mange du poisson en rêve, est-ce que ça compte? Est-ce que ça veut dire qu'on a vraiment mangé du poisson?”

RêveRéalitéNaïvetéIdéalisme
Book:The God of Small Things
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“Once you understand the process of corporate globalization, you have to see that what happened in Argentina, the devastation of Argentina by the IMF, is part of the same machine that is destroying Iraq. Both are efforts to break open and to control markets. And so Argentina is destroyed by the chequebook, and Iraq is destroyed by the cruise missile. If the chequebook won't work, the cruise missile will. Hell hath no fury like a market scorned.”

IraqGlobalizationArgentinaCorporate WorldImf
Book:The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile: Conversations With Arundhati Roy
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“Peace, Inc., is sometimes as worrying and War, Inc. It's a way of managing public anger. We're all being managed, and we don't even know it. The IMF and the World Bank, the most opaque and secretive entities, put millions into NGOs who fight against "corruption" and for "transparency." They want the Rule of Law--as long as they make the laws. They want transparency in order to standardise a situation, so that global capital can flow without any impediment. Cage the People, Free the Money. The only thing that is allowed to move freely--unimpeded--around the world today is money, capital.”

CapitalismFree MarketWorld Bank
Book:Things that Can and Cannot Be Said: Essays and Conversations
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“...el secreto de las Grandes Historias es que no tienen secretos. Las Grandes Historias son aquellas que ya se han oído y que se quiere oír otra vez. Aquellas a las que se puede entrar por cualquier puerta, y habitar en ellas cómodamente. No engañan con emociones o finales falsos. No sorprenden con imprevistos. Son tan conocidas como la casa en la que se vive. O el olor de la piel del ser amado. Sabemos cómo acaban y, sin embargo, las escuchamos como si no lo supiéramos. Del mismo modo que, aun sabiendo que algún día moriremos, vivimos como si fuésemos inmortales. En las Grandes Historias sabemos quién vive, quién muere, quién encuentra el amor y quién no. Y, aún así, queremos volver a saberlo. Ahí radica su misterio y su magia.”

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Book:The God of Small Things
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“Sonia Gandhi and her son play an important part in all of this. Their job is to run the Department of Compassion and Charisma and to win elections. They are allowed to make (and also to take credit for) decisions which appear progressive but are actually tactical and symbolic, meant to take the edge off popular anger and allow the big ship to keep on rolling. (The best example of this is the rally that was organised for Rahul Gandhi to claim victory for the cancellation of Vedanta’s permission to mine Niyamgiri for bauxite—a battle that the Dongria Kondh tribe and a coalition of activists, local as well as international, have been fighting for years. At the rally, Rahul Gandhi announced that he was “a soldier for the tribal people”. He didn’t mention that the economic policies of his party are predicated on the mass displacement of tribal people. Or that every other bauxite “giri”—hill—in the neighbourhood was having the hell mined out of it, while this “soldier for the tribal people” looked away. Rahul Gandhi may be a decent man. But for him to go around talking about the two Indias—the “Rich India” and the “Poor India”—as though the party he represents has nothing to do with it, is an insult to everybody’s intelligence, including his own.) The division of labour between politicians who have a mass base and win elections, and those who actually run the country but either do not need to (judges and bureaucrats) or have been freed of the constraint of winning elections (like the prime minister) is a brilliant subversion of democratic practice. To imagine that Sonia and Rahul Gandhi are in charge of the government would be a mistake. The real power has passed into the hands of a coven of oligarchs—judges, bureaucrats and politicians. They in turn are run like prize race-horses by the few corporations who more or less own everything in the country. They may belong to different political parties and put up a great show of being political rivals, but that’s just subterfuge for public consumption. The only real rivalry is the business rivalry between corporations.”

CorporationsIndian National CongressRahul GandhiSonia Gandhi
Author:Arundhati Roy
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“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.”

LoveInspirationalWomenNatureUnityWarriorEnvironmentalismNew World OrderNarmada ValleyThird World Feminism
Book:The cost of living
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“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.”

WarPeaceDespairIndifferenceEyesDesperationNationalityPersonalPublicSmallnessExasperationBigness
Book:The God of Small Things
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“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.”

IfsFirstsWellsWarHomeAmericaLosesEnemyTroubleReturnLogicSightSakeFolksJustificationMomentumBack Home
Book:Power Politics
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“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.”

WorldWarEnoughUsedForceNationsProcessPoorUnitedRichBandWeaponsIraqNuclearSellingNuclear WeaponsUnited NationsAccusedInvasionCowardlyFalsely AccusedPoor Nations
Book:Ordinary Person's Guide To Empire
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“Every strategy for real social change - land reform, education, public health, the equitable distribution of natural resources ... - has been cleverly, cunningly, and consistently scuttled and rendered ineffectual by those castes and that class of people which has a stranglehold on the political process.”

PeopleHas BeensRealPoliticalSocialProcessNaturalClassLandResourcesStrategyReformConsistentlySocial ChangeDistributionNatural ResourcesPublic HealthCastesEquitable
Book:War Talk
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