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
Saying
Books
Understand
Smells
History
Pictures
Look
Smell
Book
Listen
Looks
Wall
Inside

More quotes by 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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He could do only one thing at a time. If he held her, he couldn't kiss her. If he kissed her, he couldn't see her. If he saw her, he couldn't feel her.
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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The fact is that America's weapons systems have made it impossible for anybody to confront it militarily. So, all you have is your wits and your cunning, and your ability to fight in the way the Iraqis are fighting.
Arundhati Roy
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India lives in several centuries at the same time.
Arundhati Roy
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But remember that if the struggle were to resort to violence, it will lose vision, beauty and imagination. Most dangerous of all, it will marginalize and eventually victimize women. And a political struggle that does not have women at the heart of it, above it, below it, and within it is no struggle at all.
Arundhati Roy
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Snowden is the thoughtful, courageous saint of liberal reform. And Julian Assange is a sort of radical, feral prophet who has been prowling this wilderness since he was 16 years old.
Arundhati Roy
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We need a new kind of politics. Not the politics of governance, but the politics of resistance. The politics of opposition. The politics of joining hands across the world and preventing certain destruction.
Arundhati Roy
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I am completely a loner. In my head I want to feel I can be anywhere. There is a sort of recklessness that being a loner allows me.
Arundhati Roy
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Pity the nation that has to silence its writers for speaking their minds. Pity the nation that needs to jail those who ask for justice, while communal killers, mass murderers, corporate scamsters, looters, rapists, and those who prey on the poorest of the poor, roam free.
Arundhati Roy
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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.
Arundhati Roy
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When she looked at him now, she couldn't help thinking that the man he had become bore so little resemblance to the boy he had been. His smile was the only piece of baggage he had carried with him from boyhood into manhood.
Arundhati Roy
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The minute what you think of as radical becomes an institutionalised, funded operation, you're in some trouble.
Arundhati Roy
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Going to Oxford didn't necessarily make a person clever.
Arundhati Roy
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This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt.
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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As she watched him she understood the quality of his beauty. How his labor had shaped him. How the wood he fashioned had fashioned him. Each plank he planed, each nail he drove, each thing he made molded him. Had left its stamp on him. Had given him his strength, his supple grace.
Arundhati Roy
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Mao said he was prepared to have millions of Chinese people perish in a nuclear war as long as China survived... I'm beginning to find it more and more sick that only humans make it into our calculations... Annihilate life on earth, but save the nation... what's the subject heading? Stupidity or Insanity?
Arundhati Roy
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Acceptance spells death to a writer.
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