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The writer is the midwife of understanding.

Arundhati Roy

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Arundhati Roy
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: September 24
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Suzanna Arundhati Roy
Midwife
Writer
Understanding

More quotes by Arundhati Roy

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Stable markets, unstable world. Efficiency. Everybody hears about it. It's enough to make you want to be pro-inefficiency and pro-corruption.
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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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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Going to Oxford didn't necessarily make a person clever.
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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India lives in several centuries at the same time.
Arundhati Roy
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Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century.
Arundhati Roy
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Wars are never fought for altruistic reasons.
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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Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.
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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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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It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that is purloined.
Arundhati Roy
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Wars are never fought for altruistic reasons. They're usually fought for hegemony, for business. And then of course there's the business of war.
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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Excitement always leads to tears.
Arundhati Roy
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I hope that that the people in the Occupy movement are politically aware enough to know that their being excluded from the obscene amassing of wealth of US corporations is part of the same system of the exclusion and war that is being waged by these corporations in places like India, Africa and the Middle East.
Arundhati Roy
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You have come to a stage where you almost have to work on yourself. You know, on finding some tranquility with which to respond to these things, because I realize that the biggest risk that many of us run is beginning to get inured to the horrors.
Arundhati Roy
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It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain. To let it be, to travel with it, as Velutha did, is much the harder thing to do.
Arundhati Roy
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Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century. Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's minds and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.
Arundhati Roy