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 ROYThe 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.
More Arundhati Roy Quotes
-
-
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 -
Excitement always leads to tears.
ARUNDHATI ROY -
There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.
ARUNDHATI ROY -
Whatever else their faults may be, they were not radical Islamist states – Iraq was not, Syria is not, Libya was not. The most radical fundamentalist Islamist state is, of course, your America’s Saudi Arabia.
ARUNDHATI ROY -
Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century.
ARUNDHATI ROY -
Making bombs will only destroy us. It doesn’t matter whether we use them or not. They will destroy us either way.
ARUNDHATI ROY -
Flags are bits of colored cloth used first to shrinkwrap people’s brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.
ARUNDHATI ROY -
I am a woman who is a granddaughter of a lady who used to be beaten on the head by her husband, of a mother who went through hell because she was divorced and had to bring up these kids. And I can take 10 men out to lunch and pay the bill, and nobody even thinks twice about it. So don’t mess with me.
ARUNDHATI ROY -
Privatization 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 -
Fascism itself can only be turned away if all those who are outraged by it show a commitment to social justice that equals the intensity of their indignation.
ARUNDHATI ROY -
Sometimes there’s truth in old cliches. There can be no real peace without justice. And without resistance there will be no justice.
ARUNDHATI ROY -
I could weep for a river-valley, and I have. But for a country? Oh man, I don’t know.
ARUNDHATI ROY -
It was a time when the unthinkable became the thinkable and the impossible really happened.
ARUNDHATI ROY -
That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.
ARUNDHATI ROY -
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