I worry that I am allowing myself to be railroaded into offering prosaic, factual information when maybe what we need is a feral howl, or the transformative power and real precision of poetry.
-- Arundhati Roy (Introduction)

Importance: In this sentence, the author mulls over the difference between prose and poetry, and wonders whether her political aims might be more effectively achieved through observations made poetically, rather than prosaically.

In these flagrant and unabashed ways an electorate has been turned into a market, voters are seen as consumers, and democracy is being welded to a free market. Ergo: those who cannot consume do not matter.”
-- Arundhati Roy (Introduction)

Importance: In this quote, Roy points out the ways in which capitalism and representative democracy reinforce one another. Today, representative democracies overwhelmingly represent only the people with the money to consume.

What kind of depraved vision can even imagine India without the range and beauty and spectacular anarchy of all these...
-- Arundhati Roy (Democracy: Who's She When She's at Home?)