“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.”
-The God of Small Things quotes by Arundhati Roy
“There is a war that makes us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.”
-The God of Small Things, 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.”
-The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
“It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that is purloined. ”
-The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
“Change is one thing. Acceptance is another.”
-The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
“If you’re happy in a dream, does that count?”
-The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
“This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt.”
-The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
“It was a time when the unthinkable became the thinkable and the impossible really happened.”
-The God of Small Things, 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.”
-The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
“Her grief grieved her. His devastated her.”
-The God of Small Things quotes by Arundhati Roy
“Some things come with their own punishments.”
-The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
“People always loved best what they identified most with.”
-The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
“What came for them? Not death. Just the end of living.”
-The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
“There are things that can be forgotten. And things that cannot – that sit on dusty shelves like stuffed birds with baleful, sideways staring eyes.”
-The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
“Here they learned to Wait. To Watch. To think thoughts and not voice them.”
-The God of Small Things, 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 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.”
-The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
“She wore flowers in her hair and carried magic secrets in her eyes.”
-The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
“The way her body existed only where he touched her. The rest of her was smoke.”
-The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
“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.”
-The God of Small Things quotes by 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.”
-The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
“It was a time when the unthinkable became the thinkable and the impossible really happened.”
-The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
“Smells, like music, hold memories. She breathed deep, and bottled it up for posterity.” -The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
“Anything’s possible in Human Nature,” Chacko said in his Reading Aloud voice. Talking to the darkness now, suddenly insensitive to his little fountain-haired niece. “Love. Madness. Hope. Infinite joy.”
-The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
Of the four things that were Possible in Human Nature, Rahel thought that Infinnate Joy sounded the saddest. Perhaps because of the way Chacko said it.
Infinnate Joy. With a church sound to it. Like a sad fish with fins all over.”
-The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
“It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that it purloined. Over the years, as the memory of Sophie Mol … slowly faded, the Loss of Sophie Mol grew robust and alive. It was always there. Like a fruit in season. Every season. As permanent as a government job.”
-The God of Small Things, 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.”
-The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
“Ammu loved her children (of course), but their wide-eyed vulnerability and their willingness to love people who didn’t really love them exasperated her and sometimes made her want to hurt them– just as an education, a precaution.”
-The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
“Flat muscled and honey coloured. Sea secrets in his eyes. A silver raindrop in his ear.”
-The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
“The fact that something so fragile, so unbearably tender had survived, had been allowed to exist, was a miracle.”
-The God of Small Things, 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.”
-The God of Small Things quotes by Arundhati Roy