Quote

It was a grand old house, the Ayemenem House, but aloof-looking. As though it had little to do with the people who lived in it. Like an old man with rheumy eyes watching children play, seeing only transience in their shrill elation and their whole-hearted commitment to life.

Arundhati Roy

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Arundhati Roy
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: September 24
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Suzanna Arundhati Roy
Little
Lived
Shrill
Play
Seeing
Transience
Whole
Eyes
Elation
Children
Looking
Aloof
Men
Though
Hearted
Life
Eye
Grand
Like
House
Commitment
People
Littles
Watching

More quotes by Arundhati Roy

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The Congress has historically played covert communal politics in order to create what in India we call vote banks where you pit one community against another and so on in order to secure votes.
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Her grief grieved her. His devastated her.
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I'm not ambitious. I don't want to get anywhere, I don't want anything more. I sometimes think that for me that is the real freedom, that I don't want anything. I don't want money or prizes. I want people to know that a war is going to be fought.
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It's OK just to be a writer, who writes about the society in which he lives and the issues that most important. Now how can that not be a writer, it always was. It's just recently that writers have been reduced to these playthings of the market.
Arundhati Roy
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In India, whichever language you write in, the possibility of people not understanding irony or not understanding [remains there]. This as a writer is most terrifying!
Arundhati Roy
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People rarely win wars, governments rarely lose them. People get killed. Governments moult and regroup, hydra-headed. They use flags first to shrink-wrap people's minds and smother thought, and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury their willing dead.
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Ammu said that human beings were creatures of habit, and it was amazing the kind of things one could get used to.
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Biology designed the dance. Terror timed it. Dictated the rhythm with which their bodies answered each other. As though they already knew that for each tremor of pleasure they would pay with an equal measure of pain. As though they knew that how far they went would be measured against how far they would be taken.
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The writer is the midwife of understanding.
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His gratitude widened his smile and bent his back.
Arundhati Roy
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The only thing worth globalizing is dissent.
Arundhati Roy
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The U.S. corporate media, otherwise known as the free press, is that hollow pillar on which contemporary American democracy rests.
Arundhati Roy
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So here we have it. The equivocating distinction between civilisation and savagery, between the massacre of innocent people or, if you like, a clash of civilisations and collateral damage. The sophistry and fastidious algebra of infinite justice.
Arundhati Roy
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Anything's possible in Human Nature ...Love. Madness. Hope. Infinite joy.
Arundhati Roy
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He walked on water. Perhaps. But could he have *swum* on land? In matching knickers and dark glasses? With his Fountain in a Love-in-Tokyo? In pointy shoes and a puff? Would he have had the imagination?
Arundhati Roy
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Being with him made her feel as though her soul had escaped from the narrow confines of her island country into the vast, extravagant spaces of his. He made her feel as though the world belonged to them- as though it lay before them like an opened frog on a dissecting table, begging to be examined.
Arundhati Roy
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The world's 'freeest' country has the highest number in prison.
Arundhati Roy
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He folded his fear into a perfect rose. He held it out in the palm of his hand. She took it from him and put it in her hair.
Arundhati Roy
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I never do anything because I'm a celebrity, as a rule. I do what I do as a citizen.
Arundhati Roy
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How carelessly imperial power vivisected ancient civilizations. Palestine and Kashmir are imperial Britain's festering, blood-drenched gifts to the modem world. Both are fault lines in the raging international con�icts of today.
Arundhati Roy