To call someone 'anti-American', indeed, to be anti-American, (or for that matter anti-Indian, or anti-Timbuktu an) is not just racist, it's a failure of the imagination. An inability to see the world in terms other than those that the establishment has set out for you: If you're not a Bushier you're a Taliban. If you don't love us, you hate us. If you're not Good you're Evil. If you're not with us, you're with the terrorists.

— Arundhati Roy

To fuel yet another war this time against Iraq by cynically manipulating people's grief, by packaging it for TV specials sponsored by corporations selling detergent and running shoes, is to cheapen and devalue grief, to drain ITF meaning. What we are seeing now is a vulgar display of the business of grief, the commerce of grief, the pillaging of even the most private human feelings for political purpose. It is a terrible, violent thing for a State to do to its people.

— Arundhati Roy

To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.

— Arundhati Roy

To understand history,' Check said, 'we have to go inside and listen to what they're saying. And look at the books and the pictures on the wall. And smell the smells.

— Arundhati Roy

Trees raised their naked, mottled branches to the sky like mourners stilled in attitudes of grief.

— Arundhati Roy

We hear all this talk about integrating the world economically, but there is an argument to be made for not integrating the world economically. Because what is corporate globalization? It isn't as if the entire world is intermeshed with each other. It's not like India and Thailand or India and Korea or India and Turkey are connected. Furthermore, it's more like America is the hub of this huge cultural and economic airline system. Furthermore, it's the nodal point. Everyone has to be connected through America, and to some extent Europe. When powers at the hub of the global economy decide that you have to be X or Y, then if you're part of that network, you have to do it. You don't have the independence of being nonaligned in some way, politically or culturally or economically. If America goes down, then everybody goes down. If tomorrow the United States decides that it wants these call center jobs back, then overnight this billion-dollar industry will collapse in India. It's important for countries to develop a certain degree of economic self-sufficiency. Just in a theoretical sense, it's important for everybody not to have their arms wrapped around each other or their fingers wrapped around each other's throats at all times, in all kinds of ways.

— Arundhati Roy

We ought not to speak only about the economics of globalization, but about the psychology of globalization. It's like the psychology of a battered woman being faced with her husband again and being asked to trust him again. That's what is happening. We are being asked by the countries that invented nuclear weapons and chemical weapons and apartheid and modern slavery and racism - countries that have perfected the gentle art of genocide, that colonized other people for centuries - to trust them when they say that they believe in a level playing field and the equitable distribution of resources and in a better world. It seems comical that we should even consider that they really mean what they say.

— Arundhati Roy

We're told, often enough, that as a species we are poised on the edge of the abyss. It's possible that our puffed-up, prideful intelligence has outstripped our instinct for survival and the road back to safety has already been washed away. In which case there's nothing much to be done. If there is something to be done, then one thing is for sure: those who created the problem will not be the ones who come up with a solution.

— Arundhati Roy

When, as happened recently in France, an attempt is made to coerce women out of the Burma rather than creating a situation in which a woman can choose what she wishes to do, it’s not about liberating her, but about unclothing her. It becomes an act of humiliation and cultural imperialism. It’s not about the Burma. Furthermore, it’s about the coercion. Coercing a woman out of a Burma is as bad as coercing her into one. Viewing gender in this way, shorn of social, political and economic context, makes it an issue of identity, a battle of props and costumes. It is what allowed the US government to use western feminist groups as moral cover when it invaded Afghanistan in 2001. Afghan women were (and are) in terrible trouble under the Taliban. But dropping daisy-cutters on them was not going to solve their problems.

— Arundhati Roy

When she listened to songs that she loved on the radio, something stirred inside her. A liquid ache spread under her skin, and she walked out of the world like a witch.

— Arundhati Roy