#ARUNDHATI ROY

[fairuzfan]

[luthienne]

Arundhati Roy, ‘Our country has lost its moral compass’

[metamorphesque]

— Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things: A Novel

[flowerytale]

Arundhati Roy, from The God of Small Things

[gnossienne]

Arundhati Roy, Power Politics (2001)

[thespilledquotes]

The moment I saw her, a part of me walked out of my body and wrapped itself around her. And there it still remains.

Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

[sprachgitter]

on storytelling and repetition

“...the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again.”

— Arundhati Roy on Indian mythology and folklore, in God of Small Things (1997)

“It was only once – once – that an audience went to see Romeo and Juliet, and hoped they might live happily ever after. You can bet that the word soon went around the playhouses: they don’t get out of that tomb alive. But every time it’s been played, every night, every show, we stand with Romeo at the Capulets’ monument. We know: when he breaks into the tomb, he will see Juliet asleep, and believe she is dead. We know he will be dead himself before he knows better. But every time, we are on the edge of our seats, holding out our knowledge like a present we can’t give him.”

— Hilary Mantel on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, in “Can These Bones Live?”, Reith Lecture, 2017

“So what makes this poem mnemonic is not just repetition. Rather, it’s the fact that with repetition, the repeated phrase grows more and more questionable. I’ve remembered “Come on now, boys” because, with every new repetition, it seems to offer more exasperation than encouragement, more doubt than assertion. I remembered this refrain because it kept me wondering about what it meant, which is to say, it kept me wondering about the kind of future it predicted. What is mnemonic about this repetition is not the reader’s ability to remember it, but that the phrase itself remembers something about the people it addresses; it remembers violence. Repetition, then, is not only a demonstration of something that keeps recurring: an endless supply of new generations of cruel boys with sweaty fists. It is also about our inability to stop this repetition: the established cycles of repetition are like spells and there’s no anti-spell to stop them from happening. The more we repeat, the less power we have over the words and the more power the words have over us. Poetic repetition is about the potency of language and the impotence of its speakers. In our care, language is futile and change is impossible.”

— Valzhyna Mort on Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, in “FACE – FACE – FACE: A Poet Under the Spell of Loss”, The Poetry Society Annual Lecture, 2021

[quotefeeling]

The moment I saw her, a part of me walked out of my body and wrapped itself around her. And there it still remains.

Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

[resqectable]

The moment I saw her, a part of me walked out of my body and wrapped itself around her. And there it still remains.

Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

[thoughtkick]

If you’re happy in a dream, does that count?

Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

[perfectquote]

That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.

Arundhati Roy

[stay-close]

If you’re happy in a dream, does that count?

Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

[perfectfeelings]

The moment I saw her, a part of me walked out of my body and wrapped itself around her. And there it still remains.

Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

[metamorphesque]

— Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things: A Novel

[thehopefulquotes]

That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.

Arundhati Roy

[luckystarinsky]

The first love does not die, but true love comes to bury it alive.

Mahmoud Darwish