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I could weep for a river-valley, and I have. But for a country? Oh man, I don’t know.

Arundhati Roy

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

Death Kill Lose Mindset People War Willing Win
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

Break Dance Different Fiction Morning Myself Story Technology Wake Up
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

Fear Hairs Hands Himself Love Relationship Rose
The world’s ‘freeest’ country has the highest number in prison.
ARUNDHATI ROY

Country Freedom Prison World
Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Suddenly, they become the bleached bones of a story.
ARUNDHATI ROY

Bone Break Constitution Ordinary Story
Change is one thing. Acceptance is another.
ARUNDHATI ROY

Acceptance Change
Fiction is truth. I think fiction is the truest thing there ever was. My whole effort is to remove that distinction. The writer is the midwife of understanding. It’s very important for me to tell politics like a story, to make it real.
ARUNDHATI ROY

Fiction Important Politics Reality Story Truth Understand Wife Writing
States have invested themselves with the right to legitimise violence – so who gets criminalised and delegitimised? Only – or well that’s excessive – usually, the resistance.
ARUNDHATI ROY

Investment Legal Resistence Right Violence
At a time when opportunism is everything, when hope seems lost, when everything boils down to a cynical business deal, we must find the courage to dream. To reclaim romance. The romance of believing in justice, in freedom, and in dignity. For everybody.
ARUNDHATI ROY

Believe Courage Dignity Dreams Freedom Hope Justice Lost Opportunity Romance Time
A political struggle that does not have women at the heart of it, above it, below it, and within it is no struggle at all.
ARUNDHATI ROY

Heart Politics Struggle Woman
That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.
ARUNDHATI ROY

Care Love People Word
There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.
ARUNDHATI ROY

Deep Force Ignorance Silence Voice
Money need not be our only reward.
ARUNDHATI ROY

Money Need One Liner Ourselves Reward
Is globalization about ‘the eradication of world poverty,’ or is it a mutant variety of colonialism, remote controlled and digitally operated?
ARUNDHATI ROY

Control Digital Poor World
If you’re happy in a dream, does that count?
ARUNDHATI ROY

Count Dreams Happiness
Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century.
ARUNDHATI ROY

Death Kind Nation Reason War

I could weep for a river-valley, and I have. But for a country? Oh man, I don’t know.

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I could weep for a river-valley, and I have. But for a country? Oh man, I don’t know.

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