That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.
And the air was full of Thoughts and Things to Say. But at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. Big Things lurk unsaid inside.
If you're happy in a dream, does that count?
Change is one thing. Acceptance is another.
This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt.
She wore flowers in her hair and carried magic secrets in her eyes. She spoke to no one. She spent hours on the riverbank. She smoked cigarettes and had midnight swims...
When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.
The way her body existed only where he touched her. The rest of her was smoke.
Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.
I am completely a loner. In my head I want to feel I can be anywhere. There is a sort of recklessness that being a loner allows me.
He folded his fear into a perfect rose. He held it out in the palm of his hand. She took it from him and put it in her hair.
There is a war that makes us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.
The American way of life is not sustainable. It doesn’t acknowledge that there is a world beyond America.
Things can change in a day.
Ammu said that human beings were creatures of habit, and it was amazing the kind of things one could get used to.
Some things come with their own punishments.
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.
I think that I was quite a grown-up child, and I have been a pretty childish adult.
 Anything can happen to anyone.
and
b) It is best to be prepared. )
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.
D’you know what happens when you hurt people?’ Ammu said. ‘When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.
It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that is purloined.
It was a time when the unthinkable became the thinkable and the impossible really happened
Insanity hovered close at hand, like an eager waiter at an expensive restaurant.
There's really no such thing as the 'voiceless'. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.
Her grief grieved her. His devastated her.
Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Suddenly, they become the bleached bones of a story.
There are things that you can't do - like writing letters to a part of yourself. To your feet or hair. Or heart.
Either way, change will come. It could be bloody, or it could be beautiful. It depends on us.
And there it was again. Another religion turned against itself. Another edifice constructed by the human mind, decimated by human nature.
Smells, like music, hold memories. She breathed deep, and bottled it up for posterity.
People always loved best what they identified most with.
Pointed in the wrong direction, trapped outside their own history and unable to retrace their steps because their footprints had been swept away.
That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much.
He could do only one thing at a time. If he held her, he couldn't kiss her. If he kissed her, he couldn't see her. If he saw her, he couldn't feel her.
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.
By then Esthappen and Rahel had learned that the world had other ways of breaking men. They were already familiar with the smell. Sicksweet. Like old roses on a breeze.
What came for them? Not death. Just the end of living.
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.
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.
Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s minds & then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.
Must we behave like some damn godforsaken tribe that's just been discovered?
Wars are never fought for altruistic reasons.
Flat muscled and honey coloured. Sea secrets in his eyes. A silver raindrop in his ear.
Humans are animals of habit.
Madness slunk in through a chink in History. It only took a moment.
He held her as though she was a gift. Given to him in love. Something still and small. Unbearably precious.
It is true that success is the most boring thing, it is tinny and brittle, failure runs deeper. Success is dangerous. I have a very complicated relationship with that word.
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.
She was perhaps too young to realize that what she assumed was her love for [him] was actually a tentative, timorous, acceptance of herself.
Only that once again they broke the Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much.
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?
Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. Maybe many of us won't be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing.
… he remained restrained and strangely composed. It was a composure born of extreme provocation. It stemmed from a lucidity that lies beyond rage.
One beach-colored. One brown. One Loved. One Loved a Little Less.
Let's leave one alive so that it can be lonely.
To call someone 'anti-American', indeed, to be anti-American, is not just racist, it's a failure of the imagination.
Old. A viable die-able age.
There are things that can be forgotten. And things that cannot - that sit on dusty shelves like stuffed birds with baleful, sideways staring eyes.
Here they learned to Wait. To Watch. To think thoughts and not voice them.
They looked at each other. They weren't thinking anymore. The time for that had come and gone. Smashed smiles lay ahead of them. But that would be later. Lay Ter.
His gratitude widened his smile and bent his back.
To understand history,' Chacko 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.
Some days he walked along the banks of the river that smelled of shit and pesticides bought with World Bank loans.
Humbling was a nice word, Rahel thought. Humbling along without a care in the world
The fact that something so fragile, so unbearably tender had survived, had been allowed to exist, was a miracle.
From now on it is not dying we must fear, but living.
Margaret Kochamma's tiny, ordered life relinquished itself to this truly baroque bedlam with the quiet gasp of a warm body entering a chilly sea.
Neither question nor answer was meant as anything more than a polite preamble to conversation.
She viewed ethnic cleansing, famine and genocide as direct threats to her furniture.
[Internationa] Aid is just another praetorian business enterprise.
They only asked for punishments that fitted their crimes. Not ones that came like cupboards with built-in bedrooms. Not ones you spent your whole life in, wandering through its maze of shelves.
Do we need weapons to fight wars? Or do we need wars to create markets for weapons?
His eyes were polite yet maleficent, as though he was making an effort to be civil to the photographer while plotting to murder his wife.
But can we, should we, let apprehensions about the future immobilize us in the present?
...although you know that one day you will die, you live as if you won't.
When you recreate the image of man, why repeat God's mistakes?
Capitalism is destroying the planet. The two old tricks that dug it out of past crises--War and Shopping--simply will not work.
They looked cheerful in the photograph, Lenin and his wife. As though they had a new refrigerator in their drawing room, and a down payment on a DDA flat.
Debating Imperialism is a bit like debating the pros and cons of rape. What can we say? That we really miss it?
On Rahel's heart Pappachi's moth snapped open its somber wings. Out. In. And lifted its legs. Up. Down.
Politeness. Obedience. Loyalty. Intelligence. Courtesy. Efficiency.
The war against terror is not really about terror. It's about a superpower's self-destructive impulse toward supremacy, stranglehold, global hemegony.
[b.] be prepared to be prepared.
The God of Loss. The God of Small Things. He left no footprints in the sand, no ripples in water, no image in mirrors.
Ammu's tears made everything that had so far seemed unreal, real.
Red ants that had a sour farty smell when they were squashed.
 a small, sunny meadow appeared. Copper grass spangled with blue butterflies. Beyond it, an abyss. )
And on Ammu's road (to Age and Death) a small, sunny meadow appeared. Copper grass spangled with blue butterflies. Beyond it, an abyss.
He gathered her into the cave of his body." (Roy,338)
Coercing a woman out of a burka is as bad as coercing her into one. It's not about the burka. It's about the coercion.
The boat that Ammu would use to cross the river. To love by night the man her children loved by day.
Ammu watched over them fiercely. Her watchfulness stretched her, made her taut and tense. She was quick to reprimand her children, but even quicker to take offense on their behalf.
It's odd how those who dismiss the peace movement as Utopian proffer the most absurdly dreamy reasons for war.
Rahel thought of the someone who had taken the trouble to go up there with cans of paint, white for the clouds, blue for the sky, silver for the jets, and brushes, and thinner.
And the air was full of Thoughts and Things to Say. But at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. Big Things lurk unsaid inside.” ― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
Bog je zamenjen Marksom, Satana buržoazijom, raj besklasnim društvom, a crkva partijom, dok su vrsta i cilj putovanja ostali slični. Trka s preponama, na čijem cilju čeka nagrada.
Ridges of muscle on his stomach rose under his skin like divisions on a slab of chocolate. He held her close by the light of an oil lamp, and he shone as though he had been polished with a high-wax body polish.
