Arundhati Roy Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

“That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.”
-- Arundhati Roy

#Love You #People #Littles

“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

#Letting Go #Dream #Government

“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”
-- Arundhati Roy

#Life #Romantic #Lost Love

“People who promote the free market and growth are far more romantic, and far more ideologically driven and blinded by their vision than somebody who goes in and comments about the beauty of a forest or the stars in the sky.”
-- Arundhati Roy

#Stars #Sky #People

“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

#Hair #Hands #Perfect

“My writing is translated into every Indian language, it's distributed in pamphlets, in little private video things, it's everywhere. So it's a lovely pastime for the middle class to think of itself as the whole nation.”
-- Arundhati Roy

#Writing #Thinking #Class

“There's really no such thing as the 'voiceless'. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.”
-- Arundhati Roy

#Feminist #Voiceless #Unheard

“I feel ashamed that the new, nuclear, neo-liberal India thinks of itself as a 'natural ally' of Israel. Ever since India began to call itself an emerging superpower, it has become a slavish, groveling satellite state of the US.”
-- Arundhati Roy

#Thinking #Israel #Allies

“Colorful demonstrations and weekend marches are vital but alone are not powerful enough to stop wars. Wars will be stopped only when soldiers refuse to fight, when workers refuse to load weapons onto ships and aircraft, when people boycott the economic outposts of Empire that are strung across the globe.”
-- Arundhati Roy

#Powerful #War #Fighting

“In a country like India, the British were only able to rule the country because it had completely co-opted the elite of the country, who did their work for them.”
-- Arundhati Roy

#Country #India #Able

“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
-- Arundhati Roy

#Faith #Optimistic #Breathing

“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

#War #Water #Population

“Capitalism’s real “grave-diggers” may end up being its own delusional Cardinals, who have turned ideology into faith. Despite their strategic brilliance, they seem to have trouble grasping a simple fact: Capitalism is destroying the planet. The two old tricks that dug it out of past crises-War and Shopping-simply will not work.”
-- Arundhati Roy

#Real #War #Past

“India lives in several centuries at the same time. Every night outside my house I pass a road gang of emaciated laborers digging a trench to lay fiber optic cables to speed up digital revolution. They work by the light of a few candles.”
-- Arundhati Roy

#Night #Light #House

“The only thing worth globalizing is dissent.”
-- Arundhati Roy

#Dissent

“I can't be a part of the large convoy because it's not a choice that you can make. The fact that I'm an educated person means that I can't be on that convoy. I don't want to be on it. I don't want to be a victim. I don't want to disappear into the darkness.”
-- Arundhati Roy

#Mean #Choices #Darkness

“The mullahs of the Islamic world and the mullahs of the Hindu world and the mullahs of the Christian world are all on the same side. And we are against them all.”
-- Arundhati Roy

#Christian #Islamic #World

“I am an artist and a writer, and I do think that one always places oneself in the picture to see where one fits.”
-- Arundhati Roy

#Artist #Thinking #Fit

“It's odd how those who dismiss the peace movement as utopian, don't hesitate to proffer the most absurdly dreamy reasons for going to war: to stamp out terrorism, install democracy, eliminate fascism, and most entertainingly, to "rid the world of evil-doers.”
-- Arundhati Roy

#Peace #War #Evil

“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

#Mind #India #Flags

“If you're happy in a dream, does that count?”
-- Arundhati Roy

#Dream #Doe

“As a woman who grew up in a village in India, I've spent my whole life fighting tradition. There's no way that I want to be a traditional Indian housewife.”
-- Arundhati Roy

#Fighting #India #Village

“To call someone 'anti-American', indeed, to be anti-American, is not just racist, it's a failure of the imagination.”
-- Arundhati Roy

#Imagination #Racist #Anti-american

“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

#Air #Rivers #Long

“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

#Country #War #Forever

“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

#Morning #Broken #Technique

“Every people, every society, needs a culture of resistance, a culture of being difficult and disobedient, that is the only way they will ever be able to stand up to the inevitable abuse of power by whoever runs the state apparatus, the capitalists, the communists, the socialists, the Gandhians, whoever.”
-- Arundhati Roy

#Running #People #Abuse

“He held her as though she was a gift. Given to him in love. Something still and small. Unbearably precious.”
-- Arundhati Roy

#Given #Stills

“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

#Past #Thinking #Practice

“It was a time when the unthinkable became the thinkable and the impossible really happened”
-- Arundhati Roy

#Impossible #Unthinkable #Thinkable