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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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Arundhati Roy
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: September 24
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Suzanna Arundhati Roy
Courses
Course
Happened
History
Railing
Past
Encouraging
Change
Destroying
Done
Heal
Love
Instead

More quotes by Arundhati Roy

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The NGO-ization of politics threatens to turn resistance into a well-mannered, reasonable, salaried, 9-to-5 job. With a few perks thrown in. Real resistance has real consequences. And no salary.
Arundhati Roy
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Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.
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
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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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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.
Arundhati Roy
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I'm not somebody who plans my life. In fact, I don't know what's going to happen here in India, it's such a strange climate here at the moment. So very worrying.
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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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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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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Of course, there's an alternative to terrorism: it's called justice.
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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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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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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This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt.
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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Excitement always leads to tears.
Arundhati Roy
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The American way of life is not sustainable. It doesn’t acknowledge that there is a world beyond America.
Arundhati Roy
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What is happening to our world is almost too colossal for human comprehension to contain...To contemplate its girth and its circumference, to attempt to define it, to try and fight it all at once, is impossible. The only way to combat it is by fighting specific wars in specific ways.
Arundhati Roy
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From being a dream, dams have become a very cynical corrupt enterprise a way of letting governments lay their hands on huge sums of money a way of centralizing resources a way of snatching rivers away from the poor and giving them to the rich. And so in a sense they've become monuments to corruption.
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