Arundhati Roy Quotes

Society is one vast conspiracy for carving one into the kind of statue likes, and then placing it in the most convenient niche it has.

Brought up to respect the conventions, love had to end in marriage. I'm afraid it did.

It's silly that anyone in this world tells you that there are only certain people that can marry you.

The whole system of society tells you what to do.

Western women have been controlled by ideals and stereotypes as much as by material constraints.

One of the unpardonable sins, in the eyes of most people, is for a man to go about unlabeled. The world regards such a person as the police do an unmuzzled dog, not under proper control.

We limit ourselves. We're told to act and behave in certain way from birth.

That all men are alike is exactly what society would like to hear. It considers actual or imagined differences as stigmas indicating that not enough has yet been done; that something has still been left outside its machinery, not quite determined by its totality.

Conformity may not always reign in the prosperous bourgeois suburb, but it ultimately always governs.

The range of socially permissible and desirable satisfaction is greatly enlarged, but through this satisfaction, the Pleasure Principle is reduced deprived of the claims which are irreconcilable with the established society. Pleasure, thus adjusted, generates submission.

Society teaches us conditional love; i.e., "I love you if you are the way I want you to be."

Institutions provide procedures through which human conduct is patterned, compelled to go, in grooves deemed desirable by society. And this trick is performed by making these grooves appear to the individual as the only possible ones.

Love is just an institution.

How powerful social mores are! Only a spider's web lies across the volcano, yet it refrains from erupting.

We arrange our lives-even the best and boldest men and women that exist, just as much as the most limited-with reference to what society conventionally rules and makes right.

Your mothers get mighty shocked at you girls nowadays, but in her day, her mother was just on the verge of sending her to reform school.

Wild intelligence abhors any narrow world; and the world of women must stay narrow, or the woman is an outlaw. No woman could be Nietzsche or Rimbaud without ending up in a whorehouse or lobotomized.

Certainly in each social period, youth must be made to venerate the dominant absurdities.

In my day everything wasn't so PC.

The fear of being an old maid made young girls rush into matrimony with a recklessness that astonishes.

To be a woman, if not a defect, is at least a peculiarity.

There is no going back to a time when most women will feel compelled to enter or stay in a bad marriage just for economic security or social respectability. So today, the best way to get women once more interested in getting married and having children is for men to accept women's new insistence on equality. This is, I think, why educated women in America, are now more pro - marriage and more disapproving of divorce than other groups of women who have less experience with egalitarian partners or less clout in getting their needs met in relationships.

In terms of how prudish Americans were in the '40s and '50s, I have absolutely no idea. I do know about the character that I play. And I don't think it's about being prudish. I think it's about trying to balance a sense of control in this man's life.

Let the enemy rage at the gate; let him knock, pound, scream, howl; let him do his worst. We know for certain that he cannot enter our soul except by the door of our consent.

Marriage still means a lot more in the country I come from than it does here. I don't think there's anything to be gained by it for the couple. But for children I think it's an important thing.