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Life Quotes by Arundhati Roy

38 Life quotes by Arundhati Roy

All Life quotes Arundhati Roy’s page

A dream of living while you're alive, and dying only when you're dead, shows how the quote blurs the line between life and death. The quotes also warn that ignoring the wisdom of indigenous people, who practice sustainable living, can lead to our own ruin, and they picture war and love as constant backdrops to everyday life.

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“Even in the most uneventful of our lives, we are called upon to choose our battles...”

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“Life went on. Death went on. The war went on.”

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“For one struck down by Cupid’s bow Life becomes burdensome, isn’t that so?”

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“Do you make all your life’s big decisions based on mobile phone videos?”

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What came for them? Not death. Just the end of living.

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“From now on it is not dying we must fear, but living.”

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“In this way the insurrection began. Death was everywhere. Death was everything. Career. Desire. Dream. Poetry. Love. Youth itself. Dying became just…

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“And on Ammu's road (to Age and Death) a small, sunny meadow appeared. Copper grass spangled with blue butterflies. Beyond it, an…

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“There are things that can be forgotten. And things that cannot - that sit on dusty shelves like stuffed birds with baleful,…

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“In the years to come, when the war became a way of life, there would be books and films and photo exhibitions…

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It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that…

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“For the first time in her life, Tilo felt that her body had enough room to accommodate all its organs.”

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Margaret Kochamma's tiny, ordered life relinquished itself to this truly baroque bedlam with the quiet gasp of a warm body entering a…

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

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“Death was everywhere. Death was everything. Career. Desire. Dream. Poetry. Love. Youth itself. Dying became just another way of living. Graveyards sprang…

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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…

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Everybody can't have the life of a normal, average American person in India - they can't. So, it's about egalitarianism. It's about…

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To annihilate indigenous populations eventually paves the way to our own annihilation. They are the only people who practice sustainable living. We…

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“Suddenly Ammu hoped that it had been him that Rahel saw him in the march. She hoped it had been him that…

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I think people ease into this careerist professionalism, so if you're a writer it's your job to manufacture books as opposed to…

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“They wore their anguish like armour, their anger slung across their bodies like ammunition belts. At that moment, perhaps because they were…

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It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a…

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“It wasn't what lay at the end of her road that frightened Ammu as much as the nature of the road itself.…

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“The only dream worth having is to dream that you will live while you are alive, and die only when you are…

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To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar…

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We must pay close attention to those with another imagination: an imagination outside of capitalism, as well as communism. We will soon…

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“Then to give the kids a historical perspective, Chacko told them about the earth woman. He made them imagine that the earth…

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“She could hear her hair growing. It sounded like something crumbling. A burnt thing crumbling. Coal. Toast. Moths crisped on a light…

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“When Khubchand, his beloved, blind, bald, incontinent seventeen-year-old mongrel, decided to stage a miserable, long-drawn-out death, Estha nursed him through his final…

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“She discovered that underneath the aspect of the Rumpled Porcupine, a tortured Marxist was at war with an impossible, incurable Romantic -…

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“For the first time in her life, Tilo felt that her body had enough room to accomodate all of its organs.”

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The only dream worth having, I told her, is to dream that you will live while you're alive and die only when…

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As a woman who grew up in a village in India, I've spent my whole life fighting tradition. There's no way that…

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I'm not somebody who plans my life. In fact, I don't know what's going to happen here in India, it's such a…

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“Death was everywhere. Death was everything. Career. Desire. Dream. Poetry. Love. Youth itself. Dying became just another way of living.”

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It was a grand old house, the Ayemenem House, but aloof-looking. As though it had little to do with the people who…

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“If you’ll pardon me for making this somewhat prosaic observation – maybe that’s what life is, or ends up being most of…

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“It was the kind of time in the life of a family when something happens to nudge its hidden morality from its…

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More by Arundhati Roy

...As the disparity between the rich and the poor grows, the fight to corner resources is intensifying. To push through their "sweetheart deals," to…

In 2001, we were told that the war in Afghanistan was a feminist mission. The marines were liberating Afghan women from the Taliban. Can…

Poverty is a crime and the poor are terrorists

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

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…

NGOs have a complicated space in neoliberal politics. They are supposed to mop up the anger. Even when they are doing good work, they…

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…

It is such a supreme folly to believe that nuclear weapons are deadly only if they're used.

I think one of the saddest things that's happening to literature is that it's getting over-simplified by this diet of simple political ideas.

The only dream worth having, I told her, is to dream that you will live while you're alive and die only when you're dead.

But what was there to say? Only that there were tears. Only that Quietness and Emptiness fitted together like stacked spoons. Only that there…

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

“...the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to…

“stilts, the ground floors given over to parking. It’s a good idea in this car-maddened city,”

“Perhaps it’s true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes. And that…