110+ Arundhati Roy Quotes On War, Writing And India

Arundhati Roy is an Indian novelist, activist, and political commentator. She is best known for her 1997 novel, The God of Small Things, which won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction. Her work is known for its political and social commentary, and she has written extensively on the topics of social injustice, globalization, and capitalism. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Arundhati Roy on love, war, writing.

Top 10 Arundhati Roy Quotes

1. That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.
2. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.
3. There's really no such thing as the 'voiceless'. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.
4. He folded his fear into a perfect rose. He held it out in the palm of his hand. She took it from him and put it in her hair.
5. Wars are never fought for altruistic reasons. They're usually fought for hegemony, for business. And then of course there's the business of war.
6. Ammu said that human beings were creatures of habit, and it was amazing the kind of things one could get used to.
7. ...a political struggle that does not have women at the heart of it, above it, below it, and within it is no struggle at all.
8. She viewed ethnic cleansing, famine and genocide as direct threats to her furniture.
9. Railing against the past will not heal us. History has happened. It's over and done with. All we can do is to change its course by encouraging what we love instead of destroying what we don't.
10. NGOs are dangerous. They do what the missionaries used to do in Colonial times. They are Trojan Horses. The worse the situation, the more the NGOs.

Arundhati Roy Short Quotes

• The only thing worth globalizing is dissent.
• Violating human rights is integral to the project of neoliberalism and global hegemony.
• If you're happy in a dream, does that count?
• Some things come with their own punishments.
• Either way, change will come. It could be bloody, or it could be beautiful. It depends on us.
• It is such a supreme folly to believe that nuclear weapons are deadly only if they're used.
• Insanity hovered close at hand, like an eager waiter at an expensive restaurant.
• Literature is the opposite of a nuclear bomb.
• It was a time when the unthinkable became the thinkable and the impossible really happened
• Terrorism is the symptom, not the disease.

Arundhati Roy Quotes About Love

If he touched her, he couldn't talk to her, if he loved her he couldn't leave, if he spoke he couldn't listen, if he fought he couldn't win. — Arundhati Roy

Anything's possible in Human Nature ...Love. Madness. Hope. Infinite joy. — Arundhati Roy

The way her body existed only where he touched her. The rest of her was smoke. — Arundhati Roy

Ammu loved her children (of course), but their wide-eyed vulnerability and their willingness to love people who didn't really love them exasperated her and sometimes made her want to hurt them-- just as an education, a precaution. — Arundhati Roy

This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt. — Arundhati Roy

People always loved best what they identified most with. — Arundhati Roy

He held her as though she was a gift. Given to him in love. Something still and small. Unbearably precious. — Arundhati Roy

That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much. — Arundhati Roy

My writing is translated into every Indian language, it's distributed in pamphlets, in little private video things, it's everywhere. So it's a lovely pastime for the middle class to think of itself as the whole nation. — Arundhati Roy

One beach-colored. One brown. One Loved. One Loved a Little Less. — Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy Quotes About War

The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling - their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. — Arundhati Roy

Making bombs will only destroy us. It doesn't matter whether we use them or not. They will destroy us either way. — Arundhati Roy

Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century. — Arundhati Roy

It's being made out that the whole point of the war was to topple the Taliban regime and liberate Afghan women from their burqas, we are being asked to believe that the U.S. marines are actually on a feminist mission. — Arundhati Roy

It's odd how those who dismiss the peace movement as utopian, don't hesitate to proffer the most absurdly dreamy reasons for going to war: to stamp out terrorism, install democracy, eliminate fascism, and most entertainingly, to "rid the world of evil-doers. — Arundhati Roy

What is happening to our world is almost too colossal for human comprehension to contain...To contemplate its girth and its circumference, to attempt to define it, to try and fight it all at once, is impossible. The only way to combat it is by fighting specific wars in specific ways. — Arundhati Roy

I'm not ambitious. I don't want to get anywhere, I don't want anything more. I sometimes think that for me that is the real freedom, that I don't want anything. I don't want money or prizes. I want people to know that a war is going to be fought. — Arundhati Roy

Public support in the U.S. for the war against Iraq was founded on a multitiered edifice of falsehood and deceit, coordinated by the U.S. government and faithfully amplified by the corporate media. — Arundhati Roy

The only good thing about nuclear war is that it is the single most egalitarian idea that man has ever had. On the day of reckoning, you will not be asked to present your credentials. The devastation will be indiscriminate. — Arundhati Roy

The genocide will not necessarily take the form of war, or death camps. Most likely it will take the form of ecocide, in which landscapes are devastated and the populations that live there slowly starve or turn upon each other savagely because there isn't enough food or water to go around. — Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy Quotes About Writing

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

Fiction is the most joyous, beautiful, sophisticated, wonderful thing in the world. — Arundhati Roy

In India, whichever language you write in, the possibility of people not understanding irony or not understanding [remains there]. This as a writer is most terrifying! — Arundhati Roy

I've never been that person who thought that because I've written one novel, I should write another and another. It's only when there was another novel to write that I was going to write another. — Arundhati Roy

There are things that you can't do - like writing letters to a part of yourself. To your feet or hair. Or heart. — Arundhati Roy

I stand by what I write and follow through on what I write. — Arundhati Roy

It's OK just to be a writer, who writes about the society in which he lives and the issues that most important. Now how can that not be a writer, it always was. It's just recently that writers have been reduced to these playthings of the market. — Arundhati Roy

In a way, writing is an incredible act of individualism, producing your language, and yet to use it from the heart of a crowd as opposed to as an individual performance is a conflicting thing. I do stand alone, and yet it's not about being an individual or being ambitious. — Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy Quotes About India

I feel ashamed that the new, nuclear, neo-liberal India thinks of itself as a 'natural ally' of Israel. Ever since India began to call itself an emerging superpower, it has become a slavish, groveling satellite state of the US. — Arundhati Roy

The Congress has historically played covert communal politics in order to create what in India we call vote banks where you pit one community against another and so on in order to secure votes. — Arundhati Roy

India lives in several centuries at the same time. Every night outside my house I pass a road gang of emaciated laborers digging a trench to lay fiber optic cables to speed up digital revolution. They work by the light of a few candles. — Arundhati Roy

Just a few years ago India, Pakistan and Bangladesh were one country. Actually, we were many countries if you count the princely states.... Then the British drew a line, and now we're three countries, two of them pointing nukes at each other - the radical Hindu bomb and the radical Muslim bomb. — Arundhati Roy

In India, the poverty is so vast that the state cannot control it. It can beat people, but it can't prevent the poor from flooding the roads, the cities, the parks and railway station platforms. — Arundhati Roy

India's a very interesting place... there's no formal opposition, but there's genuine on-the-ground opposition. — Arundhati Roy

In India, 100 of the richest people own assets worth 25% of the gross domestic product. There's something terribly wrong. No individual and no corporation should be allowed to amass that kind of unlimited wealth, including bestselling writers like myself, who are showered with royalties. — Arundhati Roy

India lives in several centuries at the same time. — Arundhati Roy

Because of who I am and what place I have now in India, I'm petitioned all the time to get involved. It's exhausting and very difficult to have to say, 'Look, I'm only one person. I can't do everything.' I know that I don't want to be worn to the bone where I lose my sense of humor. — Arundhati Roy

In India the new government - the members of the radical Hindu Right who want India to be a 'Hindu Nation' - they're bigots. Butchers. Massacres are their unofficial election campaigns - orchestrated to polarise communities and bring in the vote. — Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy Quotes About Politics

We need a new kind of politics. Not the politics of governance, but the politics of resistance. The politics of opposition. The politics of joining hands across the world and preventing certain destruction. — Arundhati Roy

The trouble is that once you see it, you can't unsee it. And once you've seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There's no innocence. Either way, you're accountable. — Arundhati Roy

Fiction is truth. I think fiction is the truest thing there ever was. My whole effort is to remove that distinction. The writer is the midwife of understanding. It's very important for me to tell politics like a story, to make it real. — Arundhati Roy

NGOs have a complicated space in neoliberal politics. They are supposed to mop up the anger. Even when they are doing good work, they are supposed to maintain the status quo. They are the missionaries of the corporate world. — Arundhati Roy

You begin to realize that hypocrisy is not a terrible thing when you see what overt fascism is compared to sort of covert, you know, communal politics which the Congress has never been shy of indulging in. — Arundhati Roy

To stay quiet is as political an act as speaking out. — Arundhati Roy

The NGO-ization of politics threatens to turn resistance into a well-mannered, reasonable, salaried, 9-to-5 job. With a few perks thrown in. Real resistance has real consequences. And no salary. — Arundhati Roy

Election campaigns seem to siphon away political anger and even basic political intelligence into this great vaudeville, after which we all end up in exactly the same place. — Arundhati Roy

The Occupy movement found places where people who were feeling that anger could come and share it - and that is, as we all know, extremely important in any political movement. The Occupy sites became a way you could gauge the levels of anger and discontent. — Arundhati Roy

I really worry about these political people that have no personal life. If there's nothing that's lovely, and if there's nothing that's just ephemeral, that you can just lie on the floor and bust a gut laughing at, then what's the point? — Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy Quotes About Nationalism

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

Pity the nation that has to silence its writers for speaking their minds. Pity the nation that needs to jail those who ask for justice, while communal killers, mass murderers, corporate scamsters, looters, rapists, and those who prey on the poorest of the poor, roam free. — Arundhati Roy

It's so frightening, the nationalism in the air. — Arundhati Roy

Dams are the temples of secular India and almost worshipped. They are huge, wet cement flags that wave in our minds. They're the symbol of nationalism to many. — Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy Quotes About People

To annihilate indigenous populations eventually paves the way to our own annihilation. They are the only people who practice sustainable living. We think they are relics of the past, but they may be the gatekeepers to our future. — Arundhati Roy

When you say things like, 'We have to wipe out the Taliban,' what does that mean? The Taliban is not a fixed number of people. The Taliban is an ideology that has sprung out of a history that, you know, America created anyway. — Arundhati Roy

The people who created the crisis in the first place will not be the ones that come up with a solution. — Arundhati Roy

I think many people were surprised by the victory of the Congress, because it was really hard to see beyond the sort of haze of hatred that the Hindu nationalists had been spreading. — 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

People who promote the free market and growth are far more romantic, and far more ideologically driven and blinded by their vision than somebody who goes in and comments about the beauty of a forest or the stars in the sky. — Arundhati Roy

Torture has been privatized now, so you have obviously the whole scandal in America about the abuse of prisoners and the fact that, army people might be made to pay a price, but who are the privatized torturers accountable too? — Arundhati Roy

At some stage, as the water tables are dropping and the minerals that remain in the mountains are being taken out, we are going to confront a crisis from which we cannot return. The people who created the crisis in the first place will not be the ones that come up with a solution. — Arundhati Roy

When people say "the people" or "the public" as though it's the final repository of all morality, I sometimes flinch. — Arundhati Roy

The great irony is that people who live in remote areas, who are illiterate and don't own TVs, are in some ways more free because they are beyond the reach of indoctrination by the modern mass media. — Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy Quotes About Made

The fact is that America's weapons systems have made it impossible for anybody to confront it militarily. So, all you have is your wits and your cunning, and your ability to fight in the way the Iraqis are fighting. — Arundhati Roy

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

Thousands of years of ideological, philosophical and practical decisions were made. They altered the surface of the earth, the coordinates of our souls. For every one of those decisions, maybe there's another decision that could have been made, should have been made. — Arundhati Roy

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

Arundhati Roy Quotes About World

How carelessly imperial power vivisected ancient civilizations. Palestine and Kashmir are imperial Britain's festering, blood-drenched gifts to the modem world. Both are fault lines in the raging international con�icts of today. — Arundhati Roy

Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning. — Arundhati Roy

Privatisation is presented as being the only alternative to an inefficient, corrupt state. In fact, it is not a choice at all... it is a mutually profitable business contract between the private company (preferably foreign) and the ruling elite of the Third World — Arundhati Roy

Is globalization about 'the eradication of world poverty,' or is it a mutant variety of colonialism, remote controlled and digitally operated? — Arundhati Roy

The American way of life is not sustainable. It doesn’t acknowledge that there is a world beyond America. — Arundhati Roy

The world's 'freeest' country has the highest number in prison. — Arundhati Roy

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

I think it was 50 million people across the world who marched against the war in Iraq. It was perhaps the biggest display of public morality in the world - you know, I mean, before the war happened. Before the war happened, everybody knew that they were being fed lies. — Arundhati Roy

Your short-term gains are the rest of the world's long-term disasters - for everybody, including yourselves. And, I'm sorry, I've been saying you and the United States or America, when I actually mean the US government. There's a difference. Big one. — Arundhati Roy

Stable markets, unstable world. Efficiency. Everybody hears about it. It's enough to make you want to be pro-inefficiency and pro-corruption. — Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy Famous Quotes And Sayings

Every people, every society, needs a culture of resistance, a culture of being difficult and disobedient, that is the only way they will ever be able to stand up to the inevitable abuse of power by whoever runs the state apparatus, the capitalists, the communists, the socialists, the Gandhians, whoever. — Arundhati Roy

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

Empathy may be the single most important quality that must be nurtured to give peace a fighting chance. — Arundhati Roy

Human rights are fundamental rights, they are the minimum, the very least we demand. Too often, they become the goal itself. What should be the minimum becomes the maximum - all we are supposed to expect - but human rights aren't enough. The goal is, and must always be, justice. — Arundhati Roy

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

Sometimes there's truth in old cliches. There can be no real peace without justice. And without resistance there will be no justice. — Arundhati Roy

If we were to lose the ability to be emotional, if we were to lose the ability to be angry, to be outraged, we would be robots. And I refuse that. — Arundhati Roy

Capitalism’s real “grave-diggers” may end up being its own delusional Cardinals, who have turned ideology into faith. Despite their strategic brilliance, they seem to have trouble grasping a simple fact: Capitalism is destroying the planet. The two old tricks that dug it out of past crises-War and Shopping-simply will not work. — Arundhati Roy

Fascism itself can only be turned away if all those who are outraged by it show a commitment to social justice that equals the intensity of their indignation. — Arundhati Roy

India has millions of internally displaced people. And now, they are putting their bodies on the line and fighting back. They are being killed and imprisoned in their thousands. Theirs is a battle of the imagination, a battle for the redefinition of the meaning of civilisation, of the meaning of happiness, of the meaning of fulfilment. — Arundhati Roy

You have come to a stage where you almost have to work on yourself. You know, on finding some tranquility with which to respond to these things, because I realize that the biggest risk that many of us run is beginning to get inured to the horrors. — Arundhati Roy

From being a dream, dams have become a very cynical corrupt enterprise; a way of letting governments lay their hands on huge sums of money; a way of centralizing resources; a way of snatching rivers away from the poor and giving them to the rich. And so in a sense they've become monuments to corruption. — Arundhati Roy

But remember that if the struggle were to resort to violence, it will lose vision, beauty and imagination. Most dangerous of all, it will marginalize and eventually victimize women. And a political struggle that does not have women at the heart of it, above it, below it, and within it is no struggle at all. — Arundhati Roy

Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Suddenly, they become the bleached bones of a story. — Arundhati Roy

Even capitalists must surely admit, that intellectually at least, socialism is a worthy opponent. It imparts intelligence even to its adversaries. — Arundhati Roy

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. — Arundhati Roy

Power is fortified not just by what it destroys, but also by what it creates. Not just by what it takes, but also by what it gives. And powerlessness reaffirmed not just by the helplessness of those who have lost, but also by the gratitude of those who have (or think they have) gained. — Arundhati Roy

The strange thing about Roman soldiers in the comics was the amount of trouble they took over their armor and their helmets, and then, after all that, they left their legs bare. It didn't make any sense at all. Weatherwise or otherwise. — Arundhati Roy

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

I am a woman who is a granddaughter of a lady who used to be beaten on the head by her husband, of a mother who went through hell because she was divorced and had to bring up these kids. And I can take 10 men out to lunch and pay the bill, and nobody even thinks twice about it. So don’t mess with me. — Arundhati Roy

It is true that success is the most boring thing, it is tinny and brittle, failure runs deeper. Success is dangerous. I have a very complicated relationship with that word. — Arundhati Roy

See, ma'am, frankly speaking this problem can't be solved by us police or military. The problem with these tribals is they don't understand greed. Unless they become greedy there's no hope for us. I have told my boss, remove the force and instead put a TV in every home. Everything will be automatically sorted out. — Arundhati Roy

Your enemies are always manufactured to suit your purpose, right? How can you have a good enemy? You have to have an utterly evil enemy - and then the evilness has to progress. — Arundhati Roy

At a time when opportunism is everything, when hope seems lost, when everything boils down to a cynical business deal, we must find the courage to dream. To reclaim romance. The romance of believing in justice, in freedom, and in dignity. For everybody. — Arundhati Roy

Whatever else their faults may be, they were not radical Islamist states - Iraq was not, Syria is not, Libya was not. The most radical fundamentalist Islamist state is, of course, your America's Saudi Arabia. — Arundhati Roy

Memory was that woman on the train. Insane in the way she sifted through dark things in a closet and emerged with the most unlikely ones - a fleeting look, a feeling. The smell of smoke. A windscreen wiper. A mother's marble eyes. Quite sane in the way she left huge tracts of darkness veiled. Unremembered. — Arundhati Roy

Her grief grieved her. His devastated her. — Arundhati Roy

Some writers like to boil down headlines of liberal newspapers into fiction, so they say there shouldn't be communal riots, everybody should love each other, there shouldn't be boundaries or fundamentalism. But I think literature is more than that; these are political views which most of us hold anyway. — Arundhati Roy

Of course, there's an alternative to terrorism: it's called justice. — 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... 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

And there it was again. Another religion turned against itself. Another edifice constructed by the human mind, decimated by human nature. — Arundhati Roy

… he remained restrained and strangely composed. It was a composure born of extreme provocation. It stemmed from a lucidity that lies beyond rage. — 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

I am a Maoist sympathiser. I'm not a Maoist ideologue, because the communist movements in history have been just as destructive as capitalism. — Arundhati Roy

I don't have the Big Idea. I don't have the arrogance to even want to have the Big Idea. But I believe the physics of resisting power is as old as the physics of accumulating power. That's what keeps the balance in the universe... the refusal to obey. — Arundhati Roy

America is like some crazed, bewildered, rich giant bumbling around in a poor area with his pockets stuffed with money, and lots of weapons - just throwing stuff around. — Arundhati Roy

I am completely a loner. In my head I want to feel I can be anywhere. There is a sort of recklessness that being a loner allows me. — Arundhati Roy

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

Flat muscled and honey coloured. Sea secrets in his eyes. A silver raindrop in his ear. — Arundhati Roy

Truly, there's no alternative to stupidity. Cretinism is the mother of fascism. I have no defence against it, really.... — 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

Impelled by feelings that were primal yet paradoxically wholly impersonal. Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear--civilization's fear of nature, men's fear of women, power's fear of powerlessness. Man's subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify. — Arundhati Roy

There is a war that makes us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves. — Arundhati Roy

Life Lessons by Arundhati Roy

1. Arundhati Roy's work is a reminder of the importance of standing up for what is right and fighting against injustice.
2. Her work also emphasizes the power of storytelling and the importance of using language to express truth.
3. Finally, her work highlights the need to think critically and challenge the status quo in order to create meaningful change.