Quote

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.

Arundhati Roy

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Arundhati Roy
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: September 24
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Suzanna Arundhati Roy
History
Pictures
Look
Smell
Book
Listen
Looks
Wall
Inside
Saying
Books
Understand
Smells

More quotes by Arundhati Roy

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A sparrow lay dead on the backseat. She had found her way through a hole in the windscreen, tempted by some seat-sponge for her nest. She never found her way out. No one noticed her panicked car-window appeals. She died on the backseat, with her legs in the air. Like a joke.
Arundhati Roy
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I am a woman who is a granddaughter of a lady who used to be beaten on the head by her husband, of a mother who went through hell because she was divorced and had to bring up these kids. And I can take 10 men out to lunch and pay the bill, and nobody even thinks twice about it. So don’t mess with me.
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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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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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
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The IMF and the World Bank, the most opaque and secretive entities, put millions into NGOs who fight against corruption and for transparency. They want the Rule of Law - as long as they make the laws. They want transparency in order to standardise a situation, so that global capital can flow without any impediment.
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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There is nothing that pleases me more than a beautiful sentence ... It is something that satisfies me.
Arundhati Roy
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The great irony is that people who live in remote areas, who are illiterate and don't own TVs, are in some ways more free because they are beyond the reach of indoctrination by the modern mass media.
Arundhati Roy
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States have invested themselves with the right to legitimise violence - so who gets criminalised and delegitimised? Only - or well that's excessive - usually, the resistance.
Arundhati Roy
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The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling - their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.
Arundhati Roy
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Thousands are losing their jobs and homes, while corporations are being bailed out with billions of dollars.
Arundhati Roy
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That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.
Arundhati Roy
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At some stage, as the water tables are dropping and the minerals that remain in the mountains are being taken out, we are going to confront a crisis from which we cannot return. The people who created the crisis in the first place will not be the ones that come up with a solution.
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.
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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It was a time when the unthinkable became the thinkable and the impossible really happened
Arundhati Roy
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By then Esthappen and Rahel had learned that the world had other ways of breaking men. They were already familiar with the smell. Sicksweet. Like old roses on a breeze.
Arundhati Roy
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The world's 'freeest' country has the highest number in prison.
Arundhati Roy
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It is such a supreme folly to believe that nuclear weapons are deadly only if they're used.
Arundhati Roy