When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.
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.
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.
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.
Have we raised the threshold of horror so high that nothing short of a nuclear strike qualifies as a ‘real’ war? Are we to spend the rest of our lives in this state of high alert with guns pointed at each other’s heads and fingers trembling on the trigger?
So here we have it. The equivocating distinction between civilisation and savagery, between the “massacre of innocent people” or, if you like, “a clash of civilisations” and “collateral damage”. The sophistry and fastidious algebra of infinite justice.
Impelled by feelings that were primal yet paradoxically wholly impersonal. Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear – civilization’s fear of nature, men’s fear of women, power’s fear of powerlessness. Man’s subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify.
A sparrow lay dead on the backseat. She had found her way through a hole in the windscreen, tempted by some seat-sponge for her nest. She never found her way out. No one noticed her panicked car-window appeals. She died on the backseat, with her legs in the air. Like a joke.
Must we behave like some damn godforsaken tribe that’s just been discovered?
To call someone ‘anti-American’, indeed, to be anti-American, is not just racist, it’s a failure of the imagination.
Debating Imperialism is a bit like debating the pros and cons of rape. What can we say? That we really miss it?
When you recreate the image of man, why repeat God’s mistakes?
Democracy has become Empire’s euphemism for neo-liberal capitalism.
That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.
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.