Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Arundhati Roy
Age: 62
Born: 1961
Born: September 24
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Suzanna Arundhati Roy
Ends
Protest
States
Allowing
Feels
Allow
Kind
Unless
Think
Particular
Occupy
Thinking
State
Complacency
People
Space
Effectiveness
Lost
Urgency

More quotes by Arundhati Roy

Image
This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt.
Arundhati Roy
Image
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
Image
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
Image
That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.
Arundhati Roy
Image
It's so frightening, the nationalism in the air.
Arundhati Roy
Image
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
Image
How carelessly imperial power vivisected ancient civilizations. Palestine and Kashmir are imperial Britain's festering, blood-drenched gifts to the modem world. Both are fault lines in the raging international con�icts of today.
Arundhati Roy
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Margaret Kochamma's tiny, ordered life relinquished itself to this truly baroque bedlam with the quiet gasp of a warm body entering a chilly sea.
Arundhati Roy
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Acceptance spells death to a writer.
Arundhati Roy
Image
I'm not ambitious. I don't want to get anywhere, I don't want anything more. I sometimes think that for me that is the real freedom, that I don't want anything. I don't want money or prizes. I want people to know that a war is going to be fought.
Arundhati Roy
Image
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
Image
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