Avanika > Avanika's Quotes

“He sensed she was drifting on a tide that neither he nor she could do much about. He couldn't tell whether her restlessness, her compulsive and increasingly unsafe wandering through the city, marked the onset of an unsoundness of mind or an acute, perilous kind of sanity. Or were they both the same thing?”
― Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

“They have courses teaching you foreign languages and ballroom dancing and etiquette and cooking. But there are no classes to learn how to be by yourself in a furnished room with chipped dishes, or how to be alone in general without any words of concern or familiar sounds.”
― Irmgard Keun, The Artificial Silk Girl

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

“Who can know from the word goodbye what kind of parting is in store for us.”
― Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

“They had always fitted together like pieces of an unsolved (and perhaps unsolvable) puzzle- the smoke of her into the solidness of him, the solitariness of her into the gathering of him, the strangeness of her into the straightforwardness of him, the insouciance of her into the restraint of him. The quietness of her into the quietness of him.”
― Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

“Need was a warehouse that could accommodate a considerable amount of cruelty.”
― Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

“Sleep came to them, quick and easy, like money to millionaires.”
― Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

“If you’ll pardon me for making this somewhat prosaic observation – maybe that’s what life is, or ends up being most of the time: a rehearsal for a performance that never eventually materializes.”
― Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

“She could hear her hair growing. It sounded like something crumbling. A burnt thing crumbling. Coal. Toast. Moths crisped on a light bulb. She remembered reading somewhere that even after people died, their hair and nails kept growing. Like starlight, travelling through the universe long after the stars themselves had died. Like cities. Fizzy, effervescent, simulating the illusion of life while the planet they had plundered died around them.”
― Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

“She wasn’t a woman who smiled and said hello.”
― Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

“To be present in history, even as nothing more than a chuckle, was a universe away from being absent from it, from being written out of it altogether. A chuckle, after all, could become a foothold in the sheer wall of the future.”
― Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

“She sensed that in some strange tangential way, he needed her shade as much as she needed his. And she had learned from experience that Need was a warehouse that could accommodate a considerable amount of cruelty.”
― Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

“Mar gayee bulbul qafas mein Keh gayee sayyaad se Apni sunehri gaand mein Tu thoons le fasl-e-bahaar She died in her cage, the little bird, These words she left for her captor – Please take the spring harvest And shove it up your gilded arse”
― Arundhati Roy, Ministry of Utmost Happiness

“Addiction has its own mnemonics- skin, smell, the length of the loved one's fingers. In Tilo's case it was the slant of her eyes, the shape of her mouth, the almost invisible scar that slightly altered the symmetry of her lips and made her look defiant even when she did not mean to, the way her nostrils flared, announcing the displeasure even before hr eyes did.”
― Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

“Socrates asked the key question:
why should we be moral?”
― Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

“Sitting next to Tilo, breathing next to her, he felt like an empty house whose locked windows and doors were creaking open a little, to air the ghosts trapped inside it.”
― Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

“I love you,” was his reply. “I make myself keep on loving you, despite what you do. I've got to love you. We all have to love you, and believe in
you, and think you are looking out for our best interests. But look at us, Momma, and really see us.”
― V.C. Andrews, Flowers in the Attic