To me, there is nothing higher than fiction. Nothing. It is fundamentally who I am. I am a teller of stories. For me, that's the only way I can make sense of the world, with all the dance that it involves.
Arundhati RoyRead
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
Interpretation
What this quote means
Life's challenges can diminish the weight of lesser concerns, especially when faced with greater horrors.
This quote reflects on the perspective of someone who has experienced severe adversity, indicating that in the face of significant suffering, smaller issues lose their importance. Arundhati Roy highlights a stark contrast between the terror of war and the irony of finding no peace, suggesting that oneβs mindset and experiences shape what is deemed important. The repetition emphasizes a kind of resignation or acceptance of circumstances, ultimately pointing to how worse realities overshadow mundane problems.
Themes
PerspectiveAdversityImportanceWarPeace
In practice
Example use cases
During a speech on resilience, one might use this quote to emphasize how we often worry about trivial matters when faced with serious challenges.
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Caste is about dividing people up in ways that preclude every form of solidarity, because even in the lowest castes, there are divisions and sub-castes, and everyone's co-opted into the business of this hierarchical, silo-ised society.
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When I decided to write 'The God of Small Things', I had been working in cinema. It was almost a decision to downshift from there. I thought that 300 people would read it. But it created a platform of trust.
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In California, there are huge problems because of dams. I'm against big dams, per se, because I think that they are economically unfeasible. They're ecologically unsustainable. And they're hugely undemocratic.
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To call someone 'anti-American', indeed, to be anti-American, is not just racist, it's a failure of the imagination.
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