The trouble is that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you’ve seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There’s no innocence. Either way, you’re accountable.
ARUNDHATI ROYIt was a time when the unthinkable became the thinkable and the impossible really happened.
More Arundhati Roy Quotes
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Flags are bits of colored cloth used first to shrinkwrap people’s brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.
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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.
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Change is one thing. Acceptance is another.
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Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century. Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s minds and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.
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The trouble is that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you’ve seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There’s no innocence. Either way, you’re accountable.
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The revolution cannot be funded. It’s not the imagination of trusts and foundations that’s going to bring real change.
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Is globalization about ‘the eradication of world poverty,’ or is it a mutant variety of colonialism, remote controlled and digitally operated?
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Literature is the opposite of a nuclear bomb.
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You have come to a stage where you almost have to work on yourself. You know, on finding some tranquility with which to respond to these things, because I realize that the biggest risk that many of us run is beginning to get inured to the horrors.
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Excitement always leads to tears.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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NGOs are dangerous. They do what the missionaries used to do in Colonial times. They are Trojan Horses. The worse the situation, the more the NGOs.
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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.
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