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38f8d36
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The moment you say that any idea system is sacred, whether it's a religious belief system or a secular ideology, the moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible." [
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criticism
freedom-of-opinion
freedom-of-speech
freedom-of-thought
immunity
liberty
sacrosanct-ideas
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Salman Rushdie |
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eb8309b
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He knew what he knew: that the real world was full of magic, so magical worlds could easily be real.
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Salman Rushdie |
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c316a8a
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When you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible.
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Salman Rushdie |
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c1fba8e
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Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.
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writers
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Salman Rushdie |
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422678f
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Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old fillms, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to death.
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life
meaning
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Salman Rushdie |
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af42204
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So Oz finally became home; the imagined world became the actual world, as it does for us all, because the truth is that once we have left our childhood places and started out to make our own lives, armed only with what we have and are, we understand that the real secret of the ruby slippers is not that "there's no place like home," but rather that there is no longer such a place as home: except, of course, for the homes we make, or the home..
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Salman Rushdie |
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845c7a3
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perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque.
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individualism
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Salman Rushdie |
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16b361d
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Who what am I? My answer: 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've gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each "I", everyone of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar mult..
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Salman Rushdie |
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2fef7e1
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Everest silences you...when you come down, nothing seems worth saying, nothing at all. You find the nothingness wrapping you up, like a sound. Non-being. You can't keep it up, of course. the world rushes in soon enough. What shuts you up is, I think, the sight you've had of perfection: why speak if you can't manage perfect thoughts, perfect sentences? It feels like a betrayal of what you've been through. But it fades; you accept that certai..
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Salman Rushdie |
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a6efd7b
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I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.
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Salman Rushdie |
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96ac72e
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How to forgive the world for its beauty, which merely disguises its ugliness; for its gentleness, which merely cloaks its cruelty; for its illusion of continuity, seamlessly, as the night follows the day, so to speak- whereas in reality life is a series of brutal raptures, falling upon your defenseless hands, like the blows of a woodman's axe?
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Salman Rushdie |
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a4c99f0
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Things, even people have a way of leaking into each other like flavours when you cook.
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people
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Salman Rushdie |
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84dce0d
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Make as much racket as you like people. Noise is life and an excess of noise is a sign that life is good. There will be time for us all to be quiet when we are safely dead.
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Salman Rushdie |
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e7ac5b4
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For every snake, there is a ladder; for every ladder,a snake
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Salman Rushdie |
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3195052
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What you were is forever who you are.
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Salman Rushdie |
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d27e168
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In spite of all evidence that life is discontinuous, a valley of rifts, and that random chance plays a great part in our fates, we go on believing in the continuity of things, in causation and meaning. But we live on a broken mirror, and fresh cracks appear in its surface every day.
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Salman Rushdie |
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ccc9f4f
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Only under extreme pressure can we change into that which it is in our most profound nature to become . . . That is what people get wrong about transformation. We're not all shallow proteans, forever shifting shape. We're not science fiction. It's like when coal becomes diamond. It doesn't afterwards retain the possibility of change. Squeeze it as hard as you like, it won't turn into a rubber ball, or a Quattro Stagione pizza, or a self-por..
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Salman Rushdie |
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b2e3bf6
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we look up and we hope the stars look down, we pray that there may be stars for us to follow, stars moving across the heavens and leading us to our destiny, but it's only our vanity. We look at the galaxy and fall in love, but the universe cares less about us than we do about it, and the stars stay in their courses however much we may wish upon them to do otherwise. It's true that if you watch the sky-wheel turn for a while you'll see a met..
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Salman Rushdie |
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549e5cc
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Unless, of course, there's no such thing as chance;...in which case, we should either-optimistically-get up and cheer, because if everything is planned in advance, then we all have a meaning and are spared the terror of knowing ourselves to be random, without a why; or else, of course, we might-as pessimists-give up right here and now, understanding the futility of thought decision action, since nothing we think makes any difference anyway,..
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Salman Rushdie |
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949ac47
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When...did it become irrational to dislike religion, any religion, even to dislike it vehemently? When did reason get redescribed as unreason? When were the fairy stories of the superstitious placed above criticism, beyond satire? A religion was not a race. It was an idea, and ideas stood (or fell) because they were strong enough (or too weak) to withstand criticism, not because they were shielded from it. Strong ideas welcomed dissent.
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dissent
rationality
reason
religion
satire
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Salman Rushdie |
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c8305f3
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The lessons one learns at school are not always the ones the school thinks it's teaching.
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Salman Rushdie |
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18a9cb2
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India, the new myth--a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God.
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Salman Rushdie |
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4203993
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An iceberg is water striving to be land; a mountain, especially a Himalaya, especially Everest, is land's attempt to metamorphose into sky; it is grounded in flight, the earth mutated--nearly--into air, and become, in the true sense, exalted. Long before she ever encountered the mountain, Allie was aware of its brooding presence in her soul.
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Salman Rushdie |
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242fb73
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There is nothing like a War for the reinvention of lives...
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Salman Rushdie |
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d41d843
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It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.
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past
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Salman Rushdie |
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ff7d8ab
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because silence, too, has an echo, hollower and longer-lasting than the reverberations of any sound.
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Salman Rushdie |
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a80680c
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I want to suggest to you that citizens of free societies, democracies, do not preserve their freedom by pussyfooting around their fellow-citizen's opinions, even their most cherished beliefs. In free societies, you must have the free play of ideas. There must be argument, and it must be impassioned and untrammeled. A free society is not calm and eventless place - that is the kind of static, dead society dictators try to create. Free societi..
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Salman Rushdie |
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1de9382
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Ignorantly is how we all fall in love; for it is a kind of fall. Closing our eyes, we leap from that cliff in hope of a soft landing. Nor is it always soft; but still, without that leap nobody comes to life.
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Salman Rushdie |
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ffa0fe2
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Everything has shape, if you look for it. There is no escape from form.
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Salman Rushdie |
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f645101
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To be born again,' sang Gibreal Farishta tumbling from the heaveans, 'first you have to die. Ho ji! Ho ji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly Tat-taa! Takatun! How to ever smile again, if first you won't cry? How to win the darling's love mister, without a sigh?
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Salman Rushdie |
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8026ee6
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Happy endings must come at the end of something,' the Walrus pointed out. 'If they happen in the middle of a story, or an adventure, or the like, all they do is cheer things up for awhile.
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Salman Rushdie |
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ee0f6a9
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optimism is a disease
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Salman Rushdie |
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18a86b1
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Exile is a dream of a glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air.
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migration
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Salman Rushdie |
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61d43b2
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Nobody can judge an internal injury by the size of the superficial wound.
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Salman Rushdie |
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436f5ae
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My parents gave me the gift of irreligion, of growing up without bothering to ask people what gods they held dear, assuming that in fact, like my parents, they weren't interested in gods, and that this uninterest was 'normal.' You may argue that the gift was a poisoned chalice, but even if so, that's a cup from which I'd happily drink again.
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Salman Rushdie |
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37f5ec7
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everything is relative, one man's absolute belief is another man's fairy tale;
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Salman Rushdie |
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ff0e7e0
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People don't like being around despair. Our tolerance for the truly hopeless, for those who are irredeemably broken by life is strictly limited. The sob stories we like are the ones that end before we're bored.
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Salman Rushdie |
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22bcf8e
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My horizon's have shrunk and I have only endings to write.
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Salman Rushdie |
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e18be2c
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I know that when people pull apart, they usually employ misunderstanding as a weapon, deliberately getting hold of the stick's wrong end, impaling themselves on its point in order to prove the perfidy of the other.
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Salman Rushdie |
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da824f8
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We were all trapped in stories, she said, just as he used to say, his wavy hair, his naughty smile, his beautiful mind, each of us the prisoner of our own solipsistic narrative, each family the captive of the family story, each community locked within its own tale of itself, each people the victims of their own versions of history, and there were parts of the world where the narratives collided and went to war, where there were two or more ..
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Salman Rushdie |
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7a7bbe0
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For an instant, silence, noisier than a waterfall.
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Salman Rushdie |
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4bf1df0
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Things aren't like this," he kept repeating. "It shouldn't be this way." As if he had access to some other plane of existence, some parallel, "right" universe, and had sensed that our time had somehow been put out of joint. Such was his vehemence that I found myself believing him, believing, for example, in the possibility of that other life in which Vina had never left and we were making our lives together, all three of us, ascending toget..
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parallel-universe
pragmatism
reality
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Salman Rushdie |
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337ecd5
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The world is full of love stories, and all lovers are in a sense the avatars of their predecessors.
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lovers
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Salman Rushdie |
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e0caa9c
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The inevitable triumph of illusion over reality that was the single most obvious truth about the history of the human race.
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Salman Rushdie |