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5781225
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Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.
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Salman Rushdie |
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4bf76d2
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I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I'm gone which would not have happened if I had not come.
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existence
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Salman Rushdie |
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6d5f48b
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Whenever someone who knows you disappears, you lose one version of yourself. Yourself as you were seen, as you were judged to be. Lover or enemy, mother or friend, those who know us construct us, and their several knowings slant the different facets of our characters like diamond-cutter's tools. Each such loss is a step leading to the grave, where all versions blend and end.
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Salman Rushdie |
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d6f62b6
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From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.
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religion
god
inhumanity
extremism
justification
fanaticism
zealotry
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Salman Rushdie |
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bcbc632
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Memory's truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own.
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truth
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Salman Rushdie |
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1f88d6b
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Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things--childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves--that go on slipping , like sand, through our fingers.
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courage
writing
empowerment
strength
guenter-grass
record-of-life
creative-process
experience
memory
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Salman Rushdie |
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4d43611
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Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.
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regrets
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Salman Rushdie |
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0825a31
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When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced.
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reading
impact
ideas
readers
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Salman Rushdie |
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88534c6
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What kind of idea are you? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accomodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damnfool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? - The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of hundred, be smashed to bits; but, the hundredth time, will change the world.
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Salman Rushdie |
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b54f8b0
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Nobody has the right to not be offended. That right doesn't exist in any declaration I have ever read. If you are offended it is your problem, and frankly lots of things offend lots of people.
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freespeech
offense
rights
free-speech
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Salman Rushdie |
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33a7f0a
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We all owe death a life.
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Salman Rushdie |
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133dc64
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A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second.
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Salman Rushdie |
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83f4dc7
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To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?
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Salman Rushdie |
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435671a
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The only people who see the whole picture,' he murmured, 'are the ones who step out of the frame.
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Salman Rushdie |
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0c2d79f
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How do you defeat terrorism? Don't be terrorized.
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courage
freedom
serenity
terrorism
stoicism
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Salman Rushdie |
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b46d38d
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What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same.
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Salman Rushdie |
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a92c538
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Our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may again touch one another, again bounce away. This is the felt shape of a human life, neither simply linear nor wholly disjunctive nor endlessly bifurcating, but rather this bouncey-castle sequence of bumpings-into and tumblings-apart.
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Salman Rushdie |
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e045241
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Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.
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people
honesty
mask
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Salman Rushdie |
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ff05d27
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Realism can break a writer's heart.
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writing
realism
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Salman Rushdie |
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9b5f9e2
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No people whose word for 'yesterday' is the same as their word for 'tomorrow' can be said to have a firm grip on the time.
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time
india
past
humor
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Salman Rushdie |
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4dc834f
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The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings. Such people are against, to offer just a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women's rights, pluralism, secularism, short skirts, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex. There are tyrants, not Muslims. United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has said that we shoul..
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human-rights
freedom
terrorism
fundamentalism
fanaticism
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Salman Rushdie |
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46c0833
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The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.
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Salman Rushdie |
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2e1bbc4
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Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison.
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Salman Rushdie |
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df19f4a
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What can't be cured must be endured.
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Salman Rushdie |
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a52ee37
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So India's problem turns out to be the world's problem. What happened in India has happened in God's name. The problem's name is God.
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india
religion
salman
rushdie
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Salman Rushdie |
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7c521a9
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If you were an atheist, Birbal," the Emperor challenged his first minister, "what would you say to the true believers of all the great religions of the world?" Birbal was a devout Brahmin from Trivikrampur, but he answered unhesitatingly, "I would say to them that in my opinion they were all atheists as well; I merely believe in one god less than each of them." "How so?" the Emperor asked. "All true believers have good reasons for disbeliev..
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Salman Rushdie |
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0e356a2
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Who what am I? My answer: I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each 'I', every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow the world.
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Salman Rushdie |
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fb03a98
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You can't judge an internal injury by the size of the hole.
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Salman Rushdie |
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2eb8dae
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For a long while I have believed - this is perhaps my version of Sir Darius Xerxes Cama's belief in a fourth function of outsideness - that in every generation there are a few souls, call them lucky or cursed, who are simply born not belonging, who come into the world semi-detached, if you like, without strong affiliation to family or location or nation or race; that there may even be millions, billions of such souls, as many non-belongers ..
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inspirational
outsider
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Salman Rushdie |
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99179ee
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For a long while I have believed - this is perhaps my version of Sir Darius Xerxes Cama's belief in a fourth function of outsideness - that in every generation there are a few souls, call them lucky or cursed, who are simply born not belonging, who come into the world semi-detached, if you like, without strong affiliation to family or location or nation or race; that there may even be millions, billions of such souls, as many non-belongers ..
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outsider
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Salman Rushdie |
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c70af60
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We were language's magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.
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Salman Rushdie |
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ade1e90
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Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.
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reality
salman-rushdie
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Salman Rushdie |
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b8572d5
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The word 'translation' comes, etymologically, from the Latin for 'bearing across'. Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately to the notion that something can also be gained.
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Salman Rushdie |
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4c76070
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I learned: the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time.
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Salman Rushdie |
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5c7b5ec
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A sigh isn't just a sigh. We inhale the world and breathe out meaning. While we can. While we can.
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Salman Rushdie |
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e84958f
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Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet...Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.
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Salman Rushdie |
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821d1b5
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But love is what we want, not freedom. Who then is the unluckier man? The beloved, who is given his heart's desire and must for ever after fear its loss, or the free man, with his unlooked-for liberty, naked and alone between the captive armies of the earth?
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Salman Rushdie |
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41fa969
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Not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite; our hopes spill over its rim.
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Salman Rushdie |
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06e4292
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What kind of Christmas present would Jesus ask Santa for?
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jesus
humor
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Salman Rushdie |
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fdb0e55
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Question: What is the opposite of faith? Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself is a kind of belief. Doubt.
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Salman Rushdie |
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1a653a8
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We crave permission openly to become our secret selves.
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Salman Rushdie |
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63c875e
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Nothing comes from nothing, Thieflet; no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old--it is the new combinations that make them new.
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Salman Rushdie |
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6685eec
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I want more than what I want. (Vina Apsara)
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Salman Rushdie |
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e6c8d7c
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Question: What is the opposite of faith? Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself is a kind of belief. Doubt. The human condition, but what of the angelic? Halfway between Allahgod and homosap, did they ever doubt? They did: challenging God's will one day they hid muttering beneath the Throne, daring to ask forbidden things: antiquestions. Is it right that. Could it not be argued. Freedom, the old antiquest. He calmed them down,..
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Salman Rushdie |