Quote

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.

Arundhati Roy

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Arundhati Roy
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: September 24
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Suzanna Arundhati Roy
Taken
Terror
Dictated
Though
Dance
Answered
Pain
Pay
Measured
Body
Equal
Biology
Would
Already
Designed
Went
Bodies
Knew
Rhythm
Tremor
Pleasure
Measure
Timed

More quotes by Arundhati Roy

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That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.
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The secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably... in the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn't. And yet you want to know again.
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Smells, like music, hold memories. She breathed deep, and bottled it up for posterity.
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But can we, should we, let apprehensions about the future immobilize us in the present?
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The only dream worth having, I told her, is to dream that you will live while you're alive and die only when you're dead.
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Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she came from poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace Worse Things kept happening
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Election campaigns seem to siphon away political anger and even basic political intelligence into this great vaudeville, after which we all end up in exactly the same place.
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The mullahs of the Islamic world and the mullahs of the Hindu world and the mullahs of the Christian world are all on the same side. And we are against them all.
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To understand history,' Chacko said, 'we have to go inside and listen to what they're saying. And look at the books and the pictures on the wall. And smell the smells.
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The crisis of modern democracy is a profound one. Free elections, a free press and an independent judiciary mean little when the free market has reduced them to commodities available on sale to the highest bidder.
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She wore flowers in her hair and carried magic secrets in her eyes. She spoke to no one. She spent hours on the riverbank. She smoked cigarettes and had midnight swims.
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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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Whatever else their faults may be, they were not radical Islamist states - Iraq was not, Syria is not, Libya was not. The most radical fundamentalist Islamist state is, of course, your America's Saudi Arabia.
Arundhati Roy
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Non-violence should be a tactic - not an ideology preached from the sidelines to victims of massive violence.
Arundhati Roy
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Non-violence is a piece of theatre. You need an audience. What can you do when you have no audience?
Arundhati Roy
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Three-quarters of India lives on the edge of the market economy. You can't tell them that only those who can afford water can have it.
Arundhati Roy
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Once you've seen certain things, you can't un-see them, and seeing nothing is as political an act as seeing something.
Arundhati Roy
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The revolution cannot be funded. It's not the imagination of trusts and foundations that's going to bring real change.
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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.
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.
Arundhati Roy