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
When you say things like, 'We have to wipe out the Taliban,' what does that mean? The Taliban is not a fixed number of people. The Taliban is an ideology that has sprung out of a history that, you know, America created anyway.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes that the Taliban represents an ideology, not just a group of individuals, rooted in complex historical factors.
Arundhati Roy's quote challenges the simplistic notion of combating the Taliban as merely eliminating a specific group of people. It highlights the deeper ideological roots and historical context that shaped this entity, suggesting that efforts to 'wipe out' the Taliban must consider the ideological and historical complexities rather than solely focusing on military action against a defined group.
Themes
TalibanIdeologyHistoryAmericaCombating
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about foreign policy, this quote can be used to illustrate the importance of understanding the underlying issues rather than just the visible threats.
More from Arundhati Roy
All quotes →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.
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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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