Daily Inspiration Quote by Arundhati Roy

Roy is talking about self-work the way other writers talk about activism: not as a spa-day corrective, but as a survival tactic in an age that metabolizes catastrophe into background noise. The line pivots on an uneasy admission - "I realize" - as if she’s catching herself in real time, noticing how quickly outrage can fossilize into routine. That’s the nerve she presses: the real danger isn’t only the horrors themselves, but our capacity to adapt to them.

The phrasing is deliberately provisional and conversational ("You know", "almost have to"), which softens what is essentially an indictment. She’s not scolding from a pedestal; she’s including herself in "many of us", making complicity a shared condition rather than a personal failure. "Tranquility" lands with irony. It’s not tranquility as escapism, but as steadiness - the kind that prevents panic, cynicism, or numbness from taking over your moral reflexes. In Roy’s world, calm is not the opposite of anger; it’s the discipline that keeps anger usable.

The subtext is a critique of modern attention: endless crises, endless images, endless commentary. When horror becomes content, spectatorship starts to mimic participation, and the psyche protects itself by going dull. Roy’s warning is that numbness is political. Once you’re "inured", you don’t just feel less; you consent more easily. The quote reads like a small manual for remaining human under pressure: tend your inner life not to withdraw from the world, but to keep your response from being engineered into silence.