13 Quotes from The Ministry of Utmost Happiness book by Arundhati Roy
Hello and Welcome. This page is a collection of 13 quotes from The Ministry of Utmost Happiness book by Arundhati Roy that I underlined while reading the book. I hope you will like these quotes too.
By the way, I am Deepak Kundu, an avid book reader, quotes collector and blogger.
Quotes on Kashmir
- People aren't reliable. They're forever exaggerating. Kashmiris especially. And then they begin to believe in their own exaggeration as if it's God's truth.
- Kashmir was one of the few places in the world where a fair-skinned people had been ruled by a darker-skinned one.
- You have no understanding of the depths of Kashmiri duplicity. You have no idea how a people like us, who have survived a history and a geography such as ours, have learned to drive our pride underground. Duplicity is the only weapon we have. You don't know how radiantly we smile when our hearts are broken. How ferociously we can turn on those we love while we graciously embrace those whom we despise. You have no idea how warmly we can welcome you when all we really want is for you to go away.
More Quotes
- D'you know why God made Hijras? It was an experiment. He decided to create something, a living creature that is incapable of happiness. So he made us. Arre yaar, think about it, what are the things you normal people get unhappy about? Price-rise, children's school-admissions, husbands' beatings, wives' cheatings, Hindu–Muslim riots, Indo–Pak war – outside things that settle down eventually. But for us the price-rise and school-admissions and beating-husbands and cheating-wives are all inside us. The riot is inside us. The war is inside us. Indo–Pak is inside us. It will never settle down. It can't.
- Always remember – we are not just any Hijras from any place. We are the Hijras of Shahjahanabad. Our Rulers trusted us enough to put their wives and mothers in our care. Once we roamed freely in their private quarters, the zenana, of the Red Fort. They're all gone now, those mighty emperors and their queens. But we are still here. Think about that and ask yourselves why that should be.
- To be present in history, even as nothing more than a chuckle, was a universe away from being absent from it, from being written out of it altogether. A chuckle, after all, could become a foothold in the sheer wall of the future.
- The Khwabgah was called Khwabgah, because it was where special people, blessed people, came with their dreams that could not be realized in the Duniya. In the Khwabgah, Holy Souls trapped in the wrong bodies were liberated.
- Sometimes, in politics, one has to cut poison with poison.
- Capitalism is like poisoned honey. People swarm to it like bees.
- Normality in our part of the world is a bit like a boiled egg: its humdrum surface conceals at its heart a yolk of egregious violence. It is our constant anxiety about that violence, our memory of its past labours and our dread of its future manifestations, that lays down the rules for how a people as complex and as diverse as we are continue to coexist – continue to live together, tolerate each other and, from time to time, murder one another. As long as the centre holds, as long as the yolk doesn't run, we'll be fine. In moments of crisis it helps to take the long view.
- Maybe that's what life is, or ends up being most of the time: a rehearsal for a performance that never eventually materializes.
- Working in the Intelligence Bureau and reading interrogation transcripts gave a man an unparalleled understanding of human nature, more profound than any preacher, poet or psychiatrist could ever hope to attain.
- One day Kashmir will make India self-destruct. You may have blinded all of us, every one of us, with your pellet guns by then. But you will still have eyes to see what you have done to us. You're not destroying us. You are constructing us. It's yourselves that you are destroying.