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
Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Suddenly, they become the bleached bones of a story.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Ordinary events can transform into profound stories when viewed creatively.
This quote by Arundhati Roy highlights the idea that mundane experiences and simple events can take on new significance and depth when they are examined through a creative lens. It emphasizes the transformative power of storytelling, suggesting that the essence of a narrative often lies in the ordinary details that can be reimagined into something extraordinary.
Themes
StorytellingOrdinaryTransformationCreativityExperience
In practice
Example use cases
Using this quote in a creative writing workshop to inspire participants to find stories in their daily lives.
More from Arundhati Roy
All quotes βWhen 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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The process of writing a novel is like taking a journey by boat. You have to continually set yourself on course. If you get distracted or allow yourself to drift, you will never make it to the destination. It's not like highly defined train tracks or a highway; this is a path that you are creating discovering. The journey is your narrative. Keep to it and there will be a tale told.
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They arose in my mind as 'given' things, and as they came, separately, so too the links grew. An absorbing, though continually interrupted labour (especially, even apart from the necessities of life, since the mind would wing to the other pole and spread itself on the linguistics): yet always I had the sense of recording what was already 'there', somewhere: not of 'inventing'.
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It's a very excruciating life facing that blank piece of paper every day and having to reach up somewhere into the clouds and bring something down out of them.
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I have the words already. What I am seeking is the perfect order of words in the sentence. You can see for yourself how many different ways they might be arranged.
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It was my dadβs idea that music is supposed to be more than simply about entertainment and making a living, but about being of service as an integral part of the consciousness of the world. In honor of him and because itβs right, I use music in that light.
Ziggy MarleyRead