Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Fiction is the most joyous, beautiful, sophisticated, wonderful thing in the world.
Humbling was a nice word, Rahel thought. Humbling along without a care in the world
I think that I was quite a grown-up child, and I have been a pretty childish adult.
Fiction is too beautiful to be about just one thing. It should be about everything.
The people who are getting rich can't imagine that the world is not a better place.
I never do anything because I'm a celebrity, as a rule. I do what I do as a citizen.
She viewed ethnic cleansing, famine and genocide as direct threats to her furniture.
I could weep for a river-valley, and I have. But for a country? Oh man, I don't know.
Smells, like music, hold memories. She breathed deep, and bottled it up for posterity.
As I keep saying, fiction is truth. I think fiction is the truest thing there ever was.
Flat muscled and honey coloured. Sea secrets in his eyes. A silver raindrop in his ear.
Violating human rights is integral to the project of neoliberalism and global hegemony.
But can we, should we, let apprehensions about the future immobilize us in the present?
This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt.
It was a time when the unthinkable became the thinkable and the impossible really happened
It is such a supreme folly to believe that nuclear weapons are deadly only if they're used.
Human beings seem unable to live without war, but they are also unable to live without love.
Either way, change will come. It could be bloody, or it could be beautiful. It depends on us.
the truth is that it's far easier to make a bomb than to educate four hundred million people.
I kind of resent the idea that the whole world has to be interested in the American elections.
Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.
Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century.
Non-violence is a piece of theatre. You need an audience. What can you do when you have no audience?
When I'm outside the cities I do feel optimistic. There is such grandeur in India and so much beauty.
There is nothing that pleases me more than a beautiful sentence ... It is something that satisfies me.
Empathy may be the single most important quality that must be nurtured to give peace a fighting chance.
The people who created the crisis in the first place will not be the ones that come up with a solution.
The American way of life is not sustainable. It doesn’t acknowledge that there is a world beyond America.
The American people ought to know that it is not them, but their government's policies, that are so hated.
I think my eyes were knocked open and they don't close. I sometimes wish I could close them and look away.
He held her as though she was a gift. Given to him in love. Something still and small. Unbearably precious.
Thousands are losing their jobs and homes, while corporations are being bailed out with billions of dollars.
Non-violence should be a tactic - not an ideology preached from the sidelines to victims of massive violence.
The minute what you think of as radical becomes an institutionalised, funded operation, you're in some trouble.
Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Suddenly, they become the bleached bones of a story.
India's a very interesting place... there's no formal opposition, but there's genuine on-the-ground opposition.
There are things that you can't do - like writing letters to a part of yourself. To your feet or hair. Or heart.
I am an artist and a writer, and I do think that one always places oneself in the picture to see where one fits.
Making bombs will only destroy us. It doesn't matter whether we use them or not. They will destroy us either way.
Ammu said that human beings were creatures of habit, and it was amazing the kind of things one could get used to.
To call someone 'anti-American', indeed, to be anti-American, is not just racist, it's a failure of the imagination.
There's really no such thing as the 'voiceless'. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.
When people say "the people" or "the public" as though it's the final repository of all morality, I sometimes flinch.
Once you've seen certain things, you can't un-see them, and seeing nothing is as political an act as seeing something.
The revolution cannot be funded. It's not the imagination of trusts and foundations that's going to bring real change.
There's no division on my bookshelf between fiction and nonfiction. As far as I'm concerned, fiction is about the truth.
Truly, there's no alternative to stupidity. Cretinism is the mother of fascism. I have no defence against it, really....
Flags are bits of colored cloth used first to shrinkwrap people's brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.
The only dream worth having, I told her, is to dream that you will live while you're alive and die only when you're dead.
It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that is purloined.