The God of Small Things, post 3

Underlined quotes from Chapter 3 and 4, since chapter three was relatively short:

page 84:

     "Filth had laid seige to the Ayemenem House like a medieval army advancing on an enemy castle.  It clotted every crevice and clung to the windowpanes.
     Midges whizzed in teapots.  Dead insects lay in empty vases.
     The floor was sticky.  White walls had turned an uneven gray.  Brass hinges and door handles were dull and greasy to the touch.  Infrequently used plug points were clogged with grime.  Lightbulbs had a film of oil on them.  The only things that shone were the giant cockroaches that scurried around the varnished gofers on a film set.
     Baby Kochamma had stopped noticing these things long ago.  Kochu Maria, who noticed everything, had stopped caring."

page 88 (this is referring to twin siblings by the way - a sister and a brother):

     "Had he seen her?  Was he really mad?  Did he know that she was there?  They had never been shy of each other's bodies, but they had never been old enough (together) to know what shyness was.
     Now they were.  Old enough.
     Old.     A viable die-able age.
     What a funny world old was on its own, Rahel thought, and said it to herself: Old."

page 91:

She said that Public Pots were Dirty Like Money was.  You never knew who'd touched it.  Lepers.  Butchers.  Car Mechanics.  (Pus.  Blood.  Grease.)

page 93-94:

Ammu explained to Estha and Rahel that people always loved best what they identified most with.

page 107:

"When you hurt people, they begin to love you less.  That's what careless words do.  They make people love you a little less."

page 107-108:

"A cold moth with unusually dense dorsal tufts landed lightly on Rahel's heart.  Where its icy legs touched her, she got goosebumps.  Six goosebumps on her careless heart... [It] spread its velvet wings, and the chill crept into her bones."

page 108:

"Chacko often said that his ambition was to die of overeating.  Mammachi said it was a sure sign of suppressed unhappiness.  Chacko said it was no such thing.  He said it was Sheer Greed."

page 109:

"Some things come with their own punishments.  Like bedrooms with built-in cupboards.  They would all learn more about punishments soon.  That they came in different sizes.  That some were so big they were like cupboards with built-in bedrooms.  You could spend your whole life in them, wandering through dark shelving."

page 112:

"Chacko marveled at how someone so small and undefined, so vague in her resemblances, could so completely command the attention, the love, the sanity, of a grown man." 

page 112-113:

     "'Anything's possible in Human Nature,' Chacko said in his Reading Aloud voice.  Talking to the darkness now, suddenly insensitive to his little fountain-haired niece.  'Love.  Madness.  Hope.  Infinite Joy.'
     Of the four things that were Possible in Human Nature, Rahel thought that Infinite Joy sounded the saddest.  Perhaps because of the way Chacko said it.
     Infinite Joy.  With a church sound to it.  Like a sad fish with fins all over."

page 113:

     "She smiled a sleepsmile that dreamed of dolphins and deep barred blue.  It was a smile that gave no indication that the person who belonged to it was a bomb waiting to go off."

Honestly, it's going to be a while until I can find another book that surpasses Arundhati Roy in terms of language and writing.