Mother Mary Comes to Me Quotes

“Nothing made me forget the world like reading did. Nothing made me think about the world like reading did. Nothing else filled me up. Nothing else emptied me out. Sentences and paragraphs would drift through my head like clouds.”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me

“The world was too ridiculous for me to remain too sad for too long.”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me

“She was my shelter and my storm.”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me

“When it came to me, Mrs Roy taught me how to think, then raged against my thoughts. She taught me to be free and raged against my freedom. She taught me to write and resented the author I became”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me

“I have thought of my own life as a footnote to the things that really matter. Never tragic, often hilarious. Or perhaps this is the lie I tell myself. Maybe I pitched my tent where the wind blows strongest hoping it would blow my heart clean out of my body.”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me

“That kind of focused, ferocious love, regardless of what it may choose as its object, is a blessed love. The challenge for those of us who are not chosen, and instead watch love pass us by, is to
learn from it, marvel at it, and not grow bitter and incapable of love ourselves.”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me

“I learned early that the safest place can be the most dangerous. And that even when it isn’t, I make it so.”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me

“I began to refer to myself as the Hooker who won the Booker.”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me

“The priests in church said it would be as difficult for the rich to go to heaven as it was for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. I imagined the rich were busy making a gigantic needle with a huge, camel-sized eye. If you think about it, that needle has been forged. It exists. And a ceaseless cavalcade of camels passes through it.”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me

“Language that I used, not language that used me. A language in which I could describe my multilingual world to myself. I knew even then that language was outside me, not inside me. I knew it would not come to me on its own. I needed to hunt it down like prey. Disembowel it, eat it. And when I did, I knew that language, my language, would ease the way blood flowed through my body. It was out there somewhere, a live language-animal, a striped and spotted thing, grazing, waiting for me-the predator. That was the law of my jungle. It wasn't a non-violent, vegetarian dream.”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me

“Friendship is the raft I sail on. Friendship is the pennant I fly.”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me

“It made me realize how literature can join humans in a bond of quiet intimacy the way almost nothing else can.”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me

“Like most people in the world, then as well as now, we grew up between shouting and silence. Some of us made up our own minds, others had their minds made up for them.”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me

“Mrs. Roy made it her mission to disabuse boys of their seemingly God-given sense of entitlement. She turned them into considerate, respectful men, the kind the town had rarely seen. In a way she liberated them, too. She freed them of the burden of being what society thought men ought to be. She raised generations of sweet men and sent them out into the world. What she did for her girl students, the spirit she instilled in them, was nothing short of revolutionary. She gave them spines, she gave them wings, she set them free. She bequeathed her unwavering attention and her stern love on them, and they shone back at her. That revolution, like all revolutions, came at a cost.”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me

“Over the years I would learn that sharing money with love and in solidarity is a delicate process, far more difficult than hoarding it. But until we live in a more equal world, sharing (responsibly) is the best you can do.”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me

“As my personal life turned to rubble and I risked coming undone, the outside world smashed in. In a strange way, over the next several years, it was politics - and anger - that held me together.”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes To Me

“In my effort to fathom my mother, to see things from her per-spective, to accommodate her, to understand what hurt her, what made her do the things she did and to predict what she may or may not do next, I turned into a maze, a labyrinth of pathways that zigzag underground and surface in strange places, hoping to gain a vantage point for a perspective other than my own. Seeing her through lenses that were not entirely coloured by my own experience of her made me value her for the woman she was. It made me a writer. A novelist.  Because that ’s what novelists are  –  labyrinths. And now this labyrinth must make sense of its labyrinthine self without her.”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me

“I have never felt the weight or the sorrow of this memory. I really believed it was fiction. I learned that day that most of us are a living, breathing soup of memory and imagination—and that we may not be the best arbiters of which is which. So read this book as you would a novel.”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me

“La unidad familiar es la cuerda que sostiene al mundo entero.”
― Arundhati Roy, Mi refugio y mi tormenta

“When it came to me, Mrs Roy taught me how to think, then raged against my thoughts. She taught me to be free and raged against my freedom. She taught me to write and resented the author I became.”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me

“As I grew older, my very existence seemed to be enough to enrage her.”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me

“At times I felt like the most visible invisible woman in the world.”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me

“I wasn't Christian enough.
I wasn't Hindu enough.
I wasn't communist enough.
I wasn't enough.

It came as a relief. It liberated me and set me walking. For years after that I wandered through forests and river valleys, villages and border towns, to try to better understand my country. As I travelled, I wrote. That was the beginning of my restless, unruly life as a seditious, traitor-writer,

Free woman, Free writing. Like Mother Mary taught me.

I hadn't just avoided the gilded cage. I had blown it to smthereens.”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me

“Tonight I will wander on open roads Tonight I have some time off, even from my dreams”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me

“Because money can be liberating, but it can also be debilitating and as destructive as nuclear waste.”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me

“Small money is always more subversive.”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me

“The sleeping hound of addiction was alive and well in me. It leaped up at a moment’s notice. One cigarette a day went to two and then to forty in a week. And, yes, I knew about the Orange Stuff and the Yellow Stuff, too. (It’s what I drank with Bahadur the watchman in the graveyard.) But I had kept the hound on a tight leash. I had seen enough wreckage among the drugged-out hippies in Goa to know that my life depended on hanging on to that leash and never forgetting about the hound for one single second, even when it was pretending to be asleep.”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me

“It has taken me years to come to terms with the fact that I was a middle child, one of three siblings, not two. My older sibling was a boy, and my younger sibling was”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me

“As a child, it ’s all I ever thought I’d be. Nothing made me forget the world like reading did. Nothing made me think about the world like reading did. Nothing else flled me up. Nothing else emptied me out. Sentences and paragraphs would drift through my head like clouds. Kipling, Shakespeare, the opening passage of
Lolita , G. Isaac’s sentences purloined from Joyce ’s Ulysses   – ‘Bel-luomo rises from the bed of his wife ’s lover’s wife, the kerchiefed housewife is astir’ –  streaked like comets across my reading sky. I waited for ‘crude sunlight on her lemon streets’ (which never came) and mornings that would qualify as ‘rosy- fingered dawn’ (which did). I shuddered at the thought of Leopold Bloom slip-
ping a kidney wrapped in paper into his pocket and taking it home for his wife ’s faintly urine- scented breakfast.  It wasn’t all high- minded literature. Lines of purple prose would trip of my tongue in purply moments: ‘The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas . . .’ (Thanks to G. Isaac and Mrs Roy, my early liter-ary education was dominated by white male writers.)
One of the foundational practices in Mrs Roy’s school was what she called ‘free writing’. Much before she started her school  –  from the time I could hold a pencil  –  she encouraged me to write what was on my mind. She preserved the notebook”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me

“My brother and I grew up in the cleft between that syrupy dream and our capricious nightmare, not always knowing which was worse. On balance, if we had to choose between the two, I think I’d choose our nightmare, and he, the dream.”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me