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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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Arundhati Roy
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: September 24
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Suzanna Arundhati Roy
Something
Things
Seen
Seeing
Political
Certain
Nothing

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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I don't think the state will allow people to occupy a particular space unless it feels that allowing that will end up in a kind of complacency, and the effectiveness and urgency of the protest will be lost.
Arundhati Roy
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Ever since the Great Depression, we know that one of the key ways in which the US economy has stimulated growth is by manufacturing weapons and exporting war to other countries.
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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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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To annihilate indigenous populations eventually paves the way to our own annihilation. They are the only people who practice sustainable living. We think they are relics of the past, but they may be the gatekeepers to our future.
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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the truth is that it's far easier to make a bomb than to educate four hundred million people.
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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Biology designed the dance. Terror timed it. Dictated the rhythm with which their bodies answered each other. As though they already knew that for each tremor of pleasure they would pay with an equal measure of pain. As though they knew that how far they went would be measured against how far they would be taken.
Arundhati Roy
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If you're not religious, then look at it this way. This world of ours is four thousand, six hundred million years old. It could end in an afternoon.
Arundhati Roy
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Anything's possible in Human Nature ...Love. Madness. Hope. Infinite joy.
Arundhati Roy
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It's so frightening, the nationalism in the air.
Arundhati Roy
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The genocide will not necessarily take the form of war, or death camps. Most likely it will take the form of ecocide, in which landscapes are devastated and the populations that live there slowly starve or turn upon each other savagely because there isn't enough food or water to go around.
Arundhati Roy
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Empathy may be the single most important quality that must be nurtured to give peace a fighting chance.
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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Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she came from poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace Worse Things kept happening
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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Privatisation is presented as being the only alternative to an inefficient, corrupt state. In fact, it is not a choice at all... it is a mutually profitable business contract between the private company (preferably foreign) and the ruling elite of the Third World
Arundhati Roy
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His gratitude widened his smile and bent his back.
Arundhati Roy