Daily Inspiration Quote by Arundhati Roy

Roy’s line draws a clean, almost suspiciously simple border: you’re either fluent in power’s language or you hear it as a threat. The elegance is the trap. By framing the divide as a “relationship,” she makes power feel intimate, domestic, even romantic - something you accommodate, negotiate with, or refuse to tolerate. And by calling one side “comfortable,” she hints at privilege without needing to name it. Comfort is the tell: it suggests insulation, the ability to treat institutions as neutral or basically workable because they have rarely turned violent in your direction.

The more provocative move is “naturally adversarial.” Roy isn’t describing a personality type so much as a learned reflex that starts to feel innate when you’ve been repeatedly met by the state’s indifference, police force, courts, bureaucracy, borders. “Natural” here is a bitter joke: if antagonism feels like nature, it’s because history has trained your nervous system. The sentence quietly indicts the people who can afford to see dissent as a hobby, not a survival tactic.

Context matters because Roy isn’t only a novelist; she’s a public intellectual forged in postcolonial India’s contradictions, where democracy coexists with caste hierarchy, militarization, and corporate extraction. Her activism around Kashmir, dams, and nationalism makes the quote less a meditation than a diagnostic tool. It’s meant to sort audiences in real time: when power speaks, do you instinctively lean in - or brace for impact?