Arundhati Roy Quotes

Here we are 17 years later. Those agencies never did come through.

There's nobody to believe in anymore, nobody to trust.

My impressions of the Russian Revolution can be divided into two periods. The first period was when I showed deep sympathy. My second period is one of disappointment. This change was the result of close observation on the spot.

I had a lovers quarrel with the world.

It's time to get real, folks. Hope and change ain't working. Hope and change is not a solution. Hope and change is not a job.

My heart aches for America and its deceived people.

The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.

People will endure their tyrants for years, but they tear their deliverers to pieces if a millennium is not created immediately.

Deceit, Deceive, Decide just what you believe... I see faith in your eyes, Never you hear the discouraging lies. I hear faith in your cries... Broken is the promise, Betrayal... The healing hand held back by the deepened nail... Follow the god that failed.

Misanthropy ariseth from a man trusting another without having sufficient knowledge of his character, and, thinking him to be truthful, sincere, and honourable, finds a little afterwards that he is wicked, faithless, and then he meets with another of the same character. When a man experiences this often, and more particularly from those whom he considered his most dear and best friends, at last, having frequently made a slip, he hates the whole world, and thinks that there is nothing sound at all in any of them.

I am now convinced that I have never been much in love; for had I really experienced that pure and elevating passion, I should at present detest his very name, and wish him all manner of evil. But my feelings are not only cordial towards him; they are even impartial towards her. I cannot find out that I hate her at all, or that I am in the least unwilling to think her a very good sort of girl. There can be no love in all this.

It was as if something snapped in two deep inside me. My parents-- the people I’d loved the most in the world, the ones I’d always told all my secrets to, the ones I’d wanted to hide with far away from the rest of the world. They had lied, and I couldn’t imagine why. It couldn’t possibly matter why.

I hate America. I hate this country. It’s just big ideas, and stories, and people dying, and people like you. The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word 'free' to a note so high nobody can reach it. That was deliberate. Nothing on earth sounds less like freedom to me. You come to room 1013 over at the hospital, I'll show you America. Terminal, crazy and mean. I live in America, that’s hard enough, I don’t have to love it. You do that. Everybody’s got to love something.

I have a feeling that you're riding for some kind of a terrible, terrible fall. But I don't honestly know what kind.... It may be the kind where, at the age of thirty, you sit in some bar hating everybody who comes in looking as if he might have played football in college. Then again, you may pick up just enough education to hate people who say, 'It's a secret between he and I.' Or you may end up in some business office, throwing paper clips at the nearest stenographer. I just don't know.

I went to Communism as one goes to a spring of fresh water, and I left Communism as one clambers out of a poisoned river strewn with the wreckage of flooded cities and the corpses of the drowned.

…What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is—terror.

God was executed by people painfully like us, in a society very similar to our own ... by a corrupt church, a timid politician, and a fickle proletariat led by professional agitators.

I saw a huge steam roller, It blotted out the sun. The people all lay down, lay down; They did not try to run. My love and I, we looked amazed Upon the gory mystery. "Lie down, lie down!" the people cried. "The great machine is history!" My love and I, we ran away, The engine did not find us. We ran up to a mountain top, Left history far behind us. Perhaps we should have stayed and died, But somehow we don't think so. We went to see where history'd been, And my, the dead did stink so.

Men fell in love with Gilda, but they wake up with me.

Smoke You stand infront of me, pretending to be solid, but you are nothing more than smoke and mirors. You said you'd never leave, that you would care for us forever, but now you claim you cannot stay? That you've been called away. When you go, who will i turn to when it all crashes down? Tell me who. Then tell me, how I can believe anone again, if all your promises have been lies.

Repression breeds hate; hate menaces stable government.

No one gives up on something until it turns on them, whether or not that thing is real or unreal.

Because what if I got to know you and you turned out to be just like they said? What if you weren’t the person I hoped you were? That, more than anything, would have hurt the most.

No woman should ever lie about another woman. You've violated the sacred covenant between women! How will stabbing one another in the back help women to rise above patriarchal oppression?

I love people. And when you love people that much that you're disappointed in them every day, that love can turn to hate in a flash of a second.