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

“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

“She was my shelter and my storm.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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 I grew older, my very existence seemed to be enough to enrage her.”
― 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

“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

“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

“I was taken aback. Who was this person inside me that she seemed to know and whom I hadn’t yet met?”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me

“I sincerely wanted to reply but couldn’t. I had stepped through a portal and caught a glimpse of another world. I had learned a new language and couldn’t use old words anymore. “Answer me!”
― 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

“Perhaps what I am about to write is a betrayal of my younger self by the person I have become. If so, it’s no small sin. But I’m in no position to be the judge of that.”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me

“Until the day she died, she never stopped learning, never stagnated, never feared change, never lost her curiosity.”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me

“I was soon being called a writer-activist, a term I found absurd because it suggested that writing about things that vitally affected people’s lives was not the remit of a writer.”
― 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

“Pradeep and I were fused together by sorrow. It was more intense than love.”
― 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

“blasphemous”
― 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