Arundhati Roy - The God of Small Things (1998)

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Men's bums never grow up. Like school satchels, they evoke in an instant memories of childhood.

Arundhati Roy
Humbling was a nice word, Rahel thought. Humbling along without a care in the world.

Arundhati Roy
Heaven opened and the water hammered down, reviving the reluctant old well, greenmossing the pigless pigsty, carpet bombing still, tea-colored puddles the way memory bombs still, tea-colored minds.

Arundhati Roy
He remained restrained and strangely composed. It was a composure born of extreme provocation. It stemmed from a lucidity that lies beyond rage.

Arundhati Roy
They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much.

Arundhati Roy
He watched her. He took his time.
Had he known that he was about to enter a tunnel whose only egress was his own annihilation, would he have turned away?
Perhaps.
Perhaps not.
Who can tell?

Arundhati Roy
… 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 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. That is their mystery and their magic....

Arundhati Roy
As Estha stirred the thick jam he thought Two Thoughts and the Two Thoughts he thought were these: a) Anything can happen to anyone. and b) It is best to be prepared.

Arundhati Roy
When she looked at him now, she couldn't help thinking that the man he had become bore so little resemblance to the boy he had been. His smile was the only piece of baggage he had carried with him from boyhood into manhood.

Arundhati Roy
He walked on water. Perhaps. But could he have *swum* on land? In matching knickers and dark glasses? With his Fountain in a Love-in-Tokyo? In pointy shoes and a puff? Would he have had the imagination?

Arundhati Roy
Memory was that woman on the train. Insane in the way she sifted through dark things in a closet and emerged with the most unlikely ones - a fleeting look, a feeling. The smell of smoke. A windscreen wiper. A mother's marble eyes. Quite sane in the way she left huge tracts of darkness veiled. Unremembered.

Arundhati Roy
Insanity hovered close at hand, like an eager waiter at an expensive restaurant.

Arundhati Roy
With the certitude of a true believer, Vellya Paapen had assured the twins that there was no such thing in the world as a black cat. He said that there were only black cat chaped holes in the universe.

Arundhati Roy
Pointed in the wrong direction, trapped outside their own history and unable to retrace their steps because their footprints had been swept away.

Arundhati Roy
In those early amorphous years of life, when memory had only just begun, when life was full of Beginnings and no Ends, and everything was Forever...

Arundhati Roy
It was a grand old house, the Ayemenem House, but aloof-looking. As though it had little to do with the people who lived in it. Like an old man with rheumy eyes watching children play, seeing only transience in their shrill elation and their whole-hearted commitment to life.

Arundhati Roy
There are things that you can't do - like writing letters to a part of yourself. To your feet or hair. Or heart.

Arundhati Roy
Ammu said that human beings were creatures of habit, and it was amazing the kind of things one could get used to.

Arundhati Roy
Rahel's toy wristwatch had the time painted on it. Ten to two. One of her ambitions was to own a watch on which she could change the time whenever she wanted to (which according to her was what Time was meant for in the first place).

Arundhati Roy
Some things come with their own punishments. Like bedrooms with built-in cupboards. They would all learn more about punishments soon. That they came in different sizes. That some were so big they were like cupboards with built-in bedrooms. You could spend your whole life in them, wandering through dark shelving.

Arundhati Roy
They would grow up grappling with ways of living with what happened. They would try to tell themselves that in terms of geological time it was an insignificant event. Just a blink of the Earth Woman's eye. That Worse Things had happened. That Worse Things kept happening. But they would find no comfort in the thought.

Arundhati Roy
Our dreams have been doctored.We belong no where. We sail unanchored on troubled seas.We may never be allowed ashore. Our sorrows will never be sad enough. Our joys never happy enough. Our dreams never big enough. Our lives never important enough. To matter..

Arundhati Roy
She viewed ethnic cleansing, famine and genocide as direct threats to her furniture.

Arundhati Roy
Madness slunk in through a chink in History. It only took a moment.

Arundhati Roy
They broke the Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much.

Arundhati Roy
And when we look in through the windows, all we see are shadows. And when we try and listen, all we hear is a whispering. And we cannot understand the whispering, because our minds have been invaded by a war. A war that we have both won and lost. The very worst sort of war. A war that captures dreams and re-dreams them. A war that has made us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.

Arundhati Roy
He held her as though she was a gift. Given to him in love. Something still and small. Unbearably precious.

Arundhati Roy
Ammu explained to Estha and Rahel that people always loved best what they Identified most with.

Arundhati Roy
Her own grief grieved her. His devastated her. (On Sophie Mol's death, describing Mamachi's grief, and Chacko's).

Arundhati Roy
If he touched her, he couldn't talk to her, if he loved her he couldn't leave, if he spoke he couldn't listen, if he fought he couldn't win.

Arundhati Roy