Arundhati Roy Quotes

Go and lie down in the dark... for hours... and don't move. I'm locking the door now

The night is darkening round me, The wild winds coldly blow; But a tyrant spell has bound me, And I cannot, cannot go.

Outside, you don't hear a single bird, and a deathly, oppressive silence hangs over the house and clings to me as if it were going to drag me into the deepest regions of the underworld.... I wander from room to room, climb up and down the stairs and feel like a songbird whose wings have been ripped off and who keeps hurling itself against the bars of its dark cage.

You can keep a person locked up too long.

I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.

In jail I was just like everybody else, I was sitting there praying, feeling caged.

The closest thing to hell on earth is prison. It's the worst experience I've ever had in my life. Besides death.

All prisons that have existed in our society to date put people away as no human being should ever be put away.

Going to prison is like dying with your eyes open.

The world is a penal institution.

I was arrested three times and tortured once.

In the internment camp, there was nothing to do.

I was forbidden to talk to my fellow hostages.

I really don't like being in jail.

They put me in solitary confinement, and although I went on to do 8,755 days of solitary in total, the first two were the hardest. I almost went mad, beating my head against the wall.

To think that any animal would be trapped makes me so sad. It's like living in your bedroom for your entire life and never being able to go outside.

It was the darkness that got you. It was heavy darkness, greasy and compelling. It made walls round you, and shut you in so that you felt like you could not breathe.

Finished, it's finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished. Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there's a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap. I can't be punished any more. I'll go now to my kitchen, ten feet by ten feet by ten feet, and wait for him to whistle me. Nice dimensions, nice proportions, I'll lean on the table, and look at the wall, and wait for him to whistle me.

Men's legs have a terribly lonely life - standing in the dark in your trousers all day.

On his eighteenth day in the tiger cage, Robert Stoney began to lose hope of emerging unscathed.

Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept.

Prison is a second-by-second assault on the soul, a day-to-day degradation of the self, an oppressive steel and brick umbrella that transforms seconds into hours and hours into days.

If they had wanted to punish me, they should have kept me in a communal apartment. Then I would have become a wreck.

When they took a young man into Tellson's London house, they hid him somewhere till he was old. They kept him in a dark place, like a cheese, until he had the full Tellson flavour and blue-mould upon him. Then only was he permitted to be seen, spectacularly poring over large books, and casting his breeches and gaiters into the general weight of the establishment.

As I view it, spending over two years in a cage is far worse than having your face pounded and dealing with a black eye for a week or two.