Excerpts from "THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS" by Arundhati Roy

I read this 1997 Booker Award winning title in 2001, when I was in 3rd year of Engineering.
I really appreciated the work by ArundhatiRoy.


As I read through the novel there where few writings in between, particularly the excerpts where a normal thing was expressed in such a manner which exuded a rich class of writing and touched deep down the heart.


From time to time I flip through the old pages to read, not "WHAT" she has expressed but more because "HOW" she has expressed.

I am sure you will enjoy them the same as I do.Go ahead and indulge... :

• "Strange insects appeared like ideas in the evening"


• Describing an Old man- "Loose flesh that stretched willingly off his bones, like chewing gum"


• "She was Eighty-Three. Her eyes spread like butter behind her thick glasses"


• "Only the vines(trees) kept growing like the toe-nails on a corpse"


• "She said and closed her face like a cupboard"


• "Her grief and bitterness at her daughter's death coiled inside her like an angry spring"


• "Perhaps its true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetime. And that when they do, those few dozen hours, like a salvaged remains of a burned house - must be resurrected from the ruins and examined. Preserved. Accounted for"


• " It began long before Christianity arrived in a boat and seeped into kerala like tea from a teabag"


• "Rahel's new teeth were waiting inside her gums like words in a pen."


• "He hadn't been to college which accounted for his schoolboy humour."


• "He drove the thoughts away angrily. It returned and sat outside his skull like a dog."


• " Velutha dipped a thin cotton towel in an earthen pot of water. He squeezed the water out of it (savagely, as though it was an unwanted thought)."


• "The smoke rose in dense fumes and arranged itself in complex patterns against the sky"


• "Secrets 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.--- That is their mystery and their magic."


• "She thought of Chacko's laugh, and a smile stayed in her eyes for a long time."


• "She had come to Ayemenem to heal her wounded world and had lost all of it instead."


• "His mind hummed like a table fan."


• "A sound you hardly noticed, but would miss if it stopped"


• "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 to manhood."


• "The man standing in the shade of the rubber tree with coins of sunshine dancing on his body...."


• " He left behind a hole in the universe through which darkness poured like liquid tar."


• "Comrade Pillai realize that what we really needed was the process of war more than the outcome of victory"

I love all of the above but my favorite ones are "The secret of the great stories........" and "Perhaps its true that........" .In few words she has conveyed a lot.

I hope you enjoyed reading this.