"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 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 magic."
— Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things)

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

""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

"Things can change in a day."
— 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)

""Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”"
— Arundhati Roy

"Change is one thing. Acceptance is another."
— Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things)

"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

"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)

"The Great Stories are the one that you heard and want to hear again. The ones that 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 though 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."
— 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)

"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)

"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 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)

"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 Empire)

"This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt."
— Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things)

"Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Suddenly, they become the bleached bones of a story."
— 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 Things)

"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 Roy

""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 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)

""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 Things)

"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 Talk)

"There is a war that makes us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves."
— Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things)

"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 Things)

"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 Things)

"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 Roy

"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 Roy

"Revolution is not a dinner party. Revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence in which one class overthrows another."
— 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

"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 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 Roy

""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 Things)

"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 Things)

""To call someone 'anti-American', indeed, to be anti-American, is not just racist, it's a failure of the imagination.""
— Arundhati Roy

"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 Things)

"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 Things)

"…the secret of the Great Stories is 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."
— Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things)

"Quand par hasard elle changeait de chaîne, toutes ces famines, ces épidémies, ces guerres télévisuelles l'affolaient. (...) Elle considérait famines, génocides et purifications ethniques comme autant de phénomènes susceptibles de mettre son mobilier en péril. "
— Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things)

"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

"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 Things)

"Red ants that had a sour farty smell when they were squashed."
— Arundhati Roy

"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 Things)

"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 Things)

"The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. The 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."
— 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 Things)

" 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