|
85031b0
|
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 |
|
009ef15
|
That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.
|
|
|
Arundhati Roy |
|
16e3cd4
|
the secret of the Great Stories is that they no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don't deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don't surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover's skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don't. In the way that a..
|
|
|
Arundhati Roy |
|
2b84310
|
And the air was full of Thoughts and Things to Say. But at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. Big Things lurk unsaid inside.
|
|
|
Arundhati Roy |
|
30a6ea1
|
If you're happy in a dream, does that count?
|
|
happyiness
|
Arundhati Roy |
|
2ec6d17
|
She wore flowers in her hair and carried magic secrets in her eyes. She spoke to no one. She spent hours on the riverbank. She smoked cigarettes and had midnight swims...
|
|
midnight
flowers
|
Arundhati Roy |
|
5f18217
|
This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt.
|
|
|
Arundhati Roy |
|
9f4fab9
|
But what was there to say
|
|
grief
sadness
happiness
love
inspirational
emptiness
forbidden
quietness
laws
|
Arundhati Roy |
|
efea199
|
Change is one thing. Acceptance is another.
|
|
|
Arundhati Roy |
|
cbc4408
|
But what was there to say? Only that there were tears. Only that Quietness and Emptiness fitted together like stacked spoons. Only that there was a snuffling in the hollows at the base of a lovely throat. Only that a hard honey-colored shoulder had a semicircle of teethmarks on it. Only that they held each other close, long after it was over. Only that what they shared that night was not happiness, but hideous grief. Only that once again th..
|
|
grief
sadness
happiness
love
inspirational
forbidden
quietness
laws
|
Arundhati Roy |
|
b4aa5bf
|
Perhaps it's true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes. And that when they do, those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned house--the charred clock, the singed photograph, the scorched furniture--must be resurrected from the ruins and examined. Preserved. Accounted for. Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly th..
|
|
|
Arundhati Roy |
|
9e41531
|
The way her body existed only where he touched her. The rest of her was smoke.
|
|
|
Arundhati Roy |
|
19540ad
|
Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness - and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we're being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling - their..
|
|
war
hope
empire
peace
revolution
|
Arundhati Roy |
|
e6e04a1
|
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 |
|
fc97cd0
|
There is a war that makes us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.
|
|
|
Arundhati Roy |
|
017fe4e
|
It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain. To let it be, to travel with it, as Velutha did, is much the harder thing to do.
|
|
story
move-on
|
Arundhati Roy |
|
21e36d1
|
If he touched her, he couldn't talk to her, if he loved her he couldn't leave, if he spoke he couldn't listen, if he fought he couldn't win.
|
|
|
Arundhati Roy |
|
02ab965
|
Ammu said that human beings were creatures of habit, and it was amazing the kind of things one could get used to.
|
|
|
Arundhati Roy |
|
7dbab1a
|
Some things come with their own punishments.
|
|
|
Arundhati Roy |
|
b5b993e
|
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.
|
|
social-justice
civil-disobedience
non-violence
anti-war
|
Arundhati Roy |
|
1948d2d
|
As Estha stirred the thick jam he thought Two Thoughts and the Two Thoughts he thought were these: a) Anything can happen to anyone. and b) It is best to be prepared.
|
|
|
Arundhati Roy |
|
de1157d
|
D'you know what happens when you hurt people?' Ammu said. 'When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.
|
|
|
Arundhati Roy |
|
1e26888
|
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 |
|
6f51340
|
Writers imagine that they cull stories from the world. I'm beginning to believe that vanity makes them think so. That it's actually the other way around. Stories cull writers from the world. Stories reveal themselves to us. The public narrative, the private narrative - they colonize us. They commission us. They insist on being told. Fiction and nonfiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons that I don't fully underst..
|
|
|
Arundhati Roy |
|
56c5f82
|
It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that is purloined.
|
|
|
Arundhati Roy |
|
0224e6e
|
It was a time when the unthinkable became the thinkable and the impossible really happened
|
|
|
Arundhati Roy |
|
afb7ed6
|
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.
|
|
|
Arundhati Roy |
|
1a5955c
|
Being with him made her feel as though her soul had escaped from the narrow confines of her island country into the vast, extravagant spaces of his. He made her feel as though the world belonged to them- as though it lay before them like an opened frog on a dissecting table, begging to be examined.
|
|
|
Arundhati Roy |
|
f05e975
|
There are things that you can't do - like writing letters to a part of yourself. To your feet or hair. Or heart.
|
|
|
Arundhati Roy |
|
09f3490
|
But when they made love he was offended by her eyes. They behaved as though they belonged to someone else. Someone watching. Looking out of the window at the sea. At a boat in the river. Or a passerby in the mist in a hat. He was exasperated because he didn't know what that look . He put it somewhere between indifference and despair. He didn't know that in some places, like the country that Rahel came from, various kinds of despair compete..
|
|
war
exasperation
smallness
public
personal
indifference
nationality
peace
desperation
despair
eyes
|
Arundhati Roy |
|
2847cf9
|
Her grief grieved her. His devastated her.
|
|
|
Arundhati Roy |
|
4c91daf
|
Insanity hovered close at hand, like an eager waiter at an expensive restaurant.
|
|
|
Arundhati Roy |
|
9169492
|
And there it was again. Another religion turned against itself. Another edifice constructed by the human mind, decimated by human nature.
|
|
|
Arundhati Roy |
|
e2f9b21
|
People always loved best what they identified most with.
|
|
|
Arundhati Roy |
|
6860540
|
Smells, like music, hold memories. She breathed deep, and bottled it up for posterity.
|
|
|
Arundhati Roy |
|
7cda2d3
|
That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much.
|
|
|
Arundhati Roy |
|
7dd29fd
|
When she listened to songs that she loved on the radio, something stirred inside her. A liquid ache spread under her skin, and she walked out of the world like a witch.
|
|
music
inspirational
witch
beautiful
|
Arundhati Roy |
|
2d38956
|
And when we look in through the windows, all we see are shadows. And when we try and listen, all we hear is a whispering. And we cannot understand the whispering, because our minds have been invaded by a war. A war that we have both won and lost. The very worst sort of war. A war that captures dreams and re-dreams them. A war that has made us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.
|
|
|
Arundhati Roy |
|
c4566d9
|
He could do only one thing at a time. If he held her, he couldn't kiss her. If he kissed her, he couldn't see her. If he saw her, he couldn't feel her.
|
|
|
Arundhati Roy |
|
2077e28
|
If you are happy in a dream, Ammu, does that count? Estha asked. "Does what count?" "The happiness does it count?". She knew exactly what he meant, her son with his spoiled puff. Because the truth is, that only what counts, counts....."If you eat fish in a dream, does it count?" Does it mean you've eaten fish?"
|
|
|
Arundhati Roy |
|
5c52d7f
|
The moment I saw her, a part of me walked out of my body and wrapped itself around her. And there it still remains.
|
|
romance
love-at-first-sight
|
Arundhati Roy |
|
76a9120
|
Pointed in the wrong direction, trapped outside their own history and unable to retrace their steps because their footprints had been swept away.
|
|
|
Arundhati Roy |
|
0f4ac0f
|
What came for them? Not death. Just the end of living.
|
|
|
Arundhati Roy |
|
c18359e
|
As she watched him she understood the quality of his beauty. How his labor had shaped him. How the wood he fashioned had fashioned him. Each plank he planed, each nail he drove, each thing he made molded him. Had left its stamp on him. Had given him his strength, his supple grace.
|
|
|
Arundhati Roy |