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b5ffd2a
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Straight answers were beyond the powers of Rashid Khalifa, who would never take a short cut if there was a longer, twistier road available.
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shortcuts
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Salman Rushdie |
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4826ac5
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I always thought storytelling was like juggling [...] You keep a lot of different tales in the air, and juggle them up and down, and if you're good you don't drop any.
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Salman Rushdie |
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d09ff33
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Without water we are nothing", the traveler thought. "Even an emperor, denied water, would swiftly turn to dust. Water is the real monarch and we are all its slaves."
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Salman Rushdie |
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f713502
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Yes, they will trample me underfoot, the numbers marching one two three, four hundred million five hundred six, reducing me to specks of voiceless dust, just as, in all good time, they will trample my son who is not my son, and his son who will not be his, and his who will not be his, until the thousand and first generation, until a thousand and one midnights have bestowed their terrible gifts and a thousand and one children have died, beca..
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Salman Rushdie |
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ff57aa2
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Don't you know girls have to fool people every day of their lives if they want to get anywhere?
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trickery
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Salman Rushdie |
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cfc456b
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Once you have been in an earthquake you know, even if you survive without a scratch, that like a stroke in the heart, it remains in the earth's breast, horribly potential, always promising to return, to hit you again, with an even more devastating force.
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Salman Rushdie |
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9c86d6a
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Khattam-Shud,' he said slowly, 'is the Arch-Enemy of all Stories, even of language itself. He is the Prince of Silence and the Foe of Speech. And because everything ends, because dreams end, stories end, life ends, at the finish of everything we use his name. "It's finished," we tell one another, "it's over. Khattam-Shud: The End."
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fairytales
stories
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Salman Rushdie |
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33f8bf0
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Is birth always a fall?
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Salman Rushdie |
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b7d98ef
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There was once, in the country of Alifbay, a sad city, the saddest of cities, a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name. It stood by a mournful sea full of glumfish, which were so miserable to eat that they made people belch with melancholy even though the skies were blue... And in the depths of the city, beyond an old zone of ruined buildings that look like broken hearts, there lived a happy young fellow by name of Haroun, the..
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Salman Rushdie |
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95747a3
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At sixteen, you still think you can escape from your father. You aren't listening to his voice speaking through your mouth, you don't see how your gestures already mirror his; you don't see him in the way you hold your body, in the way you sign your name. You don't hear his whisper in your blood.
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fathers
family
traits
genetics
parents
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Salman Rushdie |
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1f04fe4
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Man is the Storytelling Animal, and that in stories are his identity, his meaning, and his lifeblood.
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Salman Rushdie |
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f7d76f6
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in autobiography, as in all literature, what actually happened is less important than what the author can manage to persuade his audience to believe
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Salman Rushdie |
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4710bb3
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I fell victim to the temptation of every autobiographer, to the illusion that since the past exists only in one's memories and the words which strive vainly to encapsulate them, it is possible to create past events simply by saying they occurred.
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Salman Rushdie |
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d183d39
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in words and pickles, I have immortalized my memories, although distortions are inevitable in both methods. We must live, I'm afraid, with the shadows of imperfections.
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Salman Rushdie |
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b6301ed
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When a book leaves its author's desk it changes. Even before anyone has read it, before eyes other than its creator's have looked upon a single phrase, it is irretrievably altered. It has become , that no longer belongs to its maker. It has acquired, in a sense, free will. It will make its journey through the world and there is no longer anything the author can do about it. Even he, as he looks at its sentences, reads them differently now ..
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reading
writing
books
books-and-authors
books-and-reading
published-books
publishing
metamorphosis
perception
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Salman Rushdie |
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30a0eaa
|
Running along the bank was a white rabbit wearing a waistcoat and looking worriedly at a clock. Appearing and disappearing at various points on both banks was a dark blue British police telephone booth, out of which a perplexed-looking man holding a screwdriver would periodically emerge. A group of dwarf bandits could be seen disappearing into a hole in the sky. "Time travelers," said Nobodaddy in a voice of gentle disgust. "They're everywh..
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doctor
time-travel
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Salman Rushdie |
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98e3f64
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Family history, of course, has its proper dietary laws. One is supposed to swallow and digest only the permitted parts of it, the halal portions of the past, drained of their redness, their blood. Unfortunately, this makes the stories less juicy...
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Salman Rushdie |
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715b990
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Language upon a silvered tongue affords enchantment enough.
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Salman Rushdie |
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aea53fb
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One either loves, or waits for love, or banishes love for good. That is the full range of possible choices.
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Salman Rushdie |
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ada9e20
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A little bit of one story joins onto an idea from another, and hey presto, . . . not old tales but new ones. Nothing comes from nothing.
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imagination
creation
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Salman Rushdie |
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249da8e
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Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in ritual, unthinking obeisance before a deity but rather, perhaps, in the slow clumsy, error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path.
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Salman Rushdie |
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b63ce9e
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Peace broke out.
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Salman Rushdie |
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dcd693c
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Repression is a seamless garment; a society which is authoritarian in its social and sexual codes, which crushes its women beneath the intolerable burdens of honour and propriety, breeds repressions of other kinds as well.
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women
mysogyny
repression
propriety
gender-equality
womens-rights
honor
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Salman Rushdie |
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d6d95f2
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Children get food shelter pocket money longholidays and love, all of it apparently free gratis, and most of the little fools think it's a sort of compensation for having been born. 'There are no strings on me!' They sang; but I, pinnoccio, saw the strings. Parents are impelled by the profit motive - nothing more, nothing less. For their attentions, they expected, from me, the immense dividend of greatness.
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life-purpose
greatness
parents
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salman rushdie |
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7d11252
|
If a birth is the fall-out from the explosion caused by the union of two unstable elements, then perhaps a half-life is all we can expect.
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Salman Rushdie |
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66136e4
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People think they are all sort of things they aren't' he had sad. 'They think they are talented when they're not; they think they're powerful when they're actually just bullies; they think they're good when they're bad. People fools themselves all the time, and they don't know that they're fools
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Salman Rushdie |
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b1666c5
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Can one drown in one's element... If fish can drown in water, can human beings suffocate in air?
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Salman Rushdie |
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c8822b2
|
She's no flibberti-gibberti mamzell, but a whir-stir-get-lost-sir bundla dynamite!
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Salman Rushdie |
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b6485cd
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A figure of speech is a shifty thing; it can be twisted or it can be straight.
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Salman Rushdie |
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289d4f5
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Travel was pointless. It removed you from the place in which you had a meaning, and to which you gave meaning in return by dedicating your life to it, and it spirited you away into fairylands where you were, and looked, frankly absurd.
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Salman Rushdie |
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4b25ca5
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But shame is like everything else; live with it for long enough and it becomes part of the furniture.
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Salman Rushdie |
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2d92aa7
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You never know the answers to the questions of life until you are asked.
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Salman Rushdie |
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75b2952
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I had become a kind of information magpie, gathering to myself all manner of shiny scraps of fact and hokum and books and art-history and politics and music and film, and developing, too, a certain skill in manipulating and arranging these pitiful shards so that they glittered and caught the light. Fool's gold, or priceless nuggets mined from my singular childhood's rich bohemian seam? I leave it to others to decide.
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Salman Rushdie |
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1af9318
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Maybe unhappiness is the continuum through which a human life moves, and joy just a series of blips, of islands in the stream.
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Salman Rushdie |
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20d02bd
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He told her: he fell from the sky and lived. She took a deep breath and believed him, because of her father's faith in the myriad and contradictory possibilities of life, and because, too, of what the mountain had taught her. "Okay," she said, exhaling. "I'll buy it. Just don't tell my mother, all right?" The universe was a place of wonders, and only habituation, the anaesthesia of the everyday, dulled our sight. She had read, a couple of d..
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Salman Rushdie |
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c1b1d41
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Too many people spouting too many words, and in the end those words will turn to bullets and stones.
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Salman Rushdie |
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ce9ecd6
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The beautiful came to this city [Hollywood] in huge pathetic herds, to suffer, to be humiliated, to see the powerful currency of their beauty devalued like the Russian ruble or Argentine peso;to work as bellhops, as bar hostesses, as garbage collectors, as maids. The city was a cliff and they were its stampeding lemmings. At the foot of the cliff was the valley of the broken dolls.
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Salman Rushdie |
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7cf9a94
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The process of revision should be constant and endless
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Salman Rushdie |
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2301513
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Do not contemplate what lies beyond failure while you are still trying to succeed.
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Salman Rushdie |
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bcfce8e
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What happens when you win? When your enemies are at your mercy: how will you act then? Compromise is the temptation of the weak; this is the test for the strong.
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Salman Rushdie |
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5857cf4
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I was born in the city of Bombay ... once upon a time. No, that won't do, there's no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar's Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: at night. No, it's important to be more ... On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India's..
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Salman Rushdie |
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5964d74
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Exile is a dream of 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. He hangs there, frozen in time, translated into a photograph; denied motion, suspended impossibly above his native earth, he awaits the inevitable moment at which the photograph must begin to move, and the earth reclaim its own.
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Salman Rushdie |
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cd23a58
|
It had been more than a year since the Joker's conquest of America and we were all still in shock and going through the stages of grief but now we needed to come together and set love and beauty and solidarity and friendship against the monstrous forces that faced us. Humanity was the only answer to the cartoon. I had no plan except love. I hoped another plan might emerge in time but for now there was only holding each other tightly and pas..
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love
election-year-2016
election-year-2018
election-year-2020
human-unity
literature-of-reistance
political-satire
quotes-for-new-year-2018
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Salman Rushdie |
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298885b
|
Religion was the glue of Pakistan, holding the halves together; just as consciousness, the awareness of oneself as a homogenous entity in time, a blend of past and present, is the glue of personality, holding together our then and our now.
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Salman Rushdie |