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.

The only dream worth having, I told her, is to dream that you will live while you are alive and die only when you are dead.

She wore her independence like armour. She used to say a city was just a place, not good or bad in itself, it was only the people in it who made it so.

She understood the nature of tears and the limits of laughter. She had been a witness to the full range of human folly and it was because of this that she was unafraid of it. She had seen that the only way to survive is to love. The only way to love is to be free.

Our fingerprints don't fade from the lives we touch.

The world is what it is. Men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

The past is a tricky country. You can go back, but you cannot go back the same.

When all else fails, there's always nature.

All language is but a poor translation.

It is astonishing what a person can do with a teaspoon and a willingness not to give in to sorrow.

The secret of happiness is freedom. The secret of freedom is courage.

The world is never saved in grand messianic gestures, but in the simple accumulation of gentle, soft, almost invisible acts of compassion.