Arundhati Roy

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

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

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

I think that I was quite a grown-up child, and I have been a pretty childish adult.
― Arundhati Roy

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

Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Suddenly, they become the bleached bones of a story.
― 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 shaped holes in the universe.
― 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

Either way, change will come. It could be bloody, or it could be beautiful. It depends on us.
― Arundhati Roy

There is a war that makes us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

Some things come with their own punishments.
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

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