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The American people ought to know that it is not them, but their government's policies, that are so hated.

Arundhati Roy

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Arundhati Roy
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: September 24
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Suzanna Arundhati Roy
Policies
Hated
Policy
Ought
American
Government
People

More quotes by Arundhati Roy

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May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun.
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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As a writer, I've often said that, among the other things that we need to reclaim, other than the obscene wealth of billionaires, is language. Language has been deployed to mean the exact opposite of what it really means when they talk about democracy or freedom.
Arundhati Roy
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In a way, writing is an incredible act of individualism, producing your language, and yet to use it from the heart of a crowd as opposed to as an individual performance is a conflicting thing. I do stand alone, and yet it's not about being an individual or being ambitious.
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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Literature is the opposite of a nuclear bomb.
Arundhati Roy
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One of the reasons some people get so angry with me is because I have the space now that a lot of others who think like me don't.
Arundhati Roy
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Today, the Indian government is trying to present privatization as the alternative to the state, to public enterprise. But privatization is only a further evolution of the centralized state, where the state says that they have the right to give the entire power production in Maharashtra to Enron.
Arundhati Roy
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Dams are the temples of secular India and almost worshipped. They are huge, wet cement flags that wave in our minds. They're the symbol of nationalism to many.
Arundhati Roy
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Railing against the past will not heal us. History has happened. It's over and done with. All we can do is to change its course by encouraging what we love instead of destroying what we don't.
Arundhati Roy
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The people who are getting rich can't imagine that the world is not a better place.
Arundhati Roy
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I think it was 50 million people across the world who marched against the war in Iraq. It was perhaps the biggest display of public morality in the world - you know, I mean, before the war happened. Before the war happened, everybody knew that they were being fed lies.
Arundhati Roy
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Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things. And here we are with our crash helmets on, with concertina wire all around us.
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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They looked at each other. They weren't thinking anymore. The time for that had come and gone. Smashed smiles lay ahead of them. But that would be later. Lay Ter.
Arundhati Roy
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Her grief grieved her. His devastated her.
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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India has millions of internally displaced people. And now, they are putting their bodies on the line and fighting back. They are being killed and imprisoned in their thousands. Theirs is a battle of the imagination, a battle for the redefinition of the meaning of civilisation, of the meaning of happiness, of the meaning of fulfilment.
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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Non-violence is a piece of theatre. You need an audience. What can you do when you have no audience?
Arundhati Roy