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212ac20
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We, the public, are easily, lethally offended. We have come to think of taking offence as a fundamental right. We value very little more highly than our rage, which gives us, in our opinion, the moral high ground. From this high ground we can shoot down at our enemies and inflict heavy fatalities. We take pride in our short fuses. Our anger elevates, transcends.
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stubbornness
rage
offense
pride
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Salman Rushdie |
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f3141d4
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Most people define themselves by their work, or where they come from, or suchlike; we had lived too far inside our heads. It makes actuality damn hard to handle.
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Salman Rushdie |
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8c1988a
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Is history to be considered the property of the participants only?
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Salman Rushdie |
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7f3b31c
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A comfortable prison was still a prison.
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Salman Rushdie |
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141cf71
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This unhoused, exiled Satan was perhaps the heavenly patron of all exiles, all unhoused people, all those who were torn from their place and left floating, half-this, half-that, denied the rooted person's comforting, defining sense of having solid ground beneath their feet.
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homelessness
rootedness
satan
immigrants
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Salman Rushdie |
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b75c9b5
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William the Conqueror, it is said, began by eating a mouthful of English sand.
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conquering
first-step
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Salman Rushdie |
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4f2ddd7
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I, however, was raised neither as Catholic nor as Jew. I was both, and nothing: a jewholic-anonymous, a cathjew nut, a stewpot, a mongrel cur. I was--what's the word these days?--atomised. Yessir: a real Bombay mix.
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Salman Rushdie |
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ba32085
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The ruthlessness of the godly invalidated their claims of virtue.
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virtue
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Salman Rushdie |
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76ca1b3
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After a winter's gestation in its eggshell of ice, the valley had beaked its way out into the open, moist and yellow.
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Salman Rushdie |
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0d8bb1b
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I have been so-many too-many persons; life, unlike syntax, allows one more than three.
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Salman Rushdie |
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cb5bfa9
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Confusion to our enemies!
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Salman Rushdie |
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69cb84c
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Life again refused to remain lifesized
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Salman Rushdie |
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c74a27c
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He did not wish to be divine. If there had never been a God, the emperor thought, it might have been easier to work out what goodness was. This business of worship, of the abnegation of self in the face of the Almighty, was a distraction, a false trail. 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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religion
salman-rushdie
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Salman Rushdie |
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364235e
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History is natural selection. Mutant versions of the past struggle for dominance; new species of fact arise,and old, saurian truths go to the wall, blindfolded and smoking last cigarettes. Only the mutations of the strong survive. The weak, the anonymous, the defeated leave few marks: field-patterns, axe-heads, folk-tales, broken pitchers, burial mounds, the fading memory of their youthful beauty. History loves only those who dominate her: ..
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Salman Rushdie |
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c0be50c
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The adult chops down his childhood to help his grown-up self. The unsentimentality is appealing, don't you think?
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Salman Rushdie |
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2160d89
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Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today. I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity. 'Respect for religion' has become a..
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criticism
freedom
hebdo
freedom-of-expression
totalitarianism
terrorism
orthodoxy
satire
islam
free-speech
paris
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Salman Rushdie |
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d7bd143
|
You will see, as time goes by," said Ibn Rushd, "that in the end it will be religion that will make men turn away from God. The godly are God's worst advocates. It may take a thousand and one years but in the end religion will shrivel away and only then will we begin to live in God's truth."
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Salman Rushdie |
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7aa3ddb
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We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world's resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love.
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Salman Rushdie |
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db4512e
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Tragedy happens - "tragic mistakes" happen - when men act according to their flawed natures, in fulfillment of their preordained destinies. The tragedy of the four killers of Amadou Diallo is that their deeds were made possible by their general preconceptions about black people and poor neighborhoods; by a theory of policing that encourages them to be rigid and punitive toward petty offenders; and by a social context in which the possession..
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Salman Rushdie |
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a9ba2ef
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proving once again that there was no escape from recurrence.
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Salman Rushdie |
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b6509da
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Then a strange moment came, a moment of the kind that determines the fate of nations, because when a crowd loses its fear of an army the world changes.
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Salman Rushdie |
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61e17ea
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this is our tragedy, she said in his words, our fictions are killing us, but if we didn't have those fictions, maybe that would kill us too.
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Salman Rushdie |
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24c74b5
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In these our cowardly times, we deny the grandeur of the Universal, and assert and glorify our local Bigotries, and so we cannot agree on much. In these our degenerate times, men bent on nothing but vainglory and personal gain- hollow, bombastic men for whom nothing is off-limits if it advances their petty cause- will claim to be great leaders and benefactors, acting in the common good, and calling all who oppose them liars, envious, little..
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resist
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Salman Rushdie |
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4546874
|
They were deeply in love, which beats earplugs.
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love
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Salman Rushdie |
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9a73e88
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She dreamed of him, his face, filling the dream. "Things are ending," he told her. "This civilization; things are closing in on it. It has been quite a culture, brilliant and foul, cannibal and Christian, the glory of the world. We should celebrate it while we can; until night falls." She didn't agree, not even in the dream, but she knew, as she dreamed, that there was no point telling him now."
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Salman Rushdie |
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1c15d8d
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they came in search of the hot stuff, just like any man calling on a tart.
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Salman Rushdie |
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583ea0e
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She watched him recede into the past as he stood...each successive moment of him passing before her eyes and being lost forever.
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Salman Rushdie |
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85908c7
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This is how people behave when their dailiness is destroyed, when for a few moments they see, plain and unadorned, one of the great shaping forces of life. Calamity fixes them with her mesmeric eye, and they begin to scoop and paw at the rubble of their days, trying to pluck the memory of the quotidian - a toy, a book, a garment, even a photograph - from the garbage heaps of the irretrievable, of their overwhelming loss.
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Salman Rushdie |
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490421e
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Study history, Alleluia. In this century history stopped paying attention to the old psychological orientation of reality. I mean, these days, character isn't destiny any more. Economics is destiny. Ideology is destiny. Bombs are destiny. What does a famine, a gas chamber, a grenade care how you lived your life? Crisis comes, death comes, and your pathetic individual self doesn't have a thing to do with it, only to suffer the effects. This ..
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history
death
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Salman Rushdie |
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a798e91
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I'll tell you a secret about fear: it's an absolutist. With fear, it's all or nothing. Either, like any bullying tyrant, it rules your life with stupid blinding omnipotence, or else you overthrow it, and its power vanishes in a puff of smoke. And another secret: the revolution against fear, the engendering of that tawdry despot's fall, has more or less nothing to do with 'courage'. It is driven by something much more straightforward: the si..
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Salman Rushdie |
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414c356
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The black ice of that dark fortress received the sunlight like a mortal wound.
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Salman Rushdie |
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3314ed6
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When you've fallen from the sky, been abandoned by your friend, suffered police brutality, metamorphosed into a goat, lost your work as well as your wife, learned the power of hatred and regained human shape, what is there left to do but, as you would no doubt phrase it, demand your rights?
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Salman Rushdie |
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18cff0b
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Dokato ne mu gi zadadat, chovek ne znae otgovorite na v'prosite na zhivota.
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Salman Rushdie |
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8789160
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She says, trying uselessly to console me: 'What are you so long for in your face? Everybody forgets some small things, all the time!' But if small things go, will large things be close behind?
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Salman Rushdie |
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b680452
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So the film was a kind of lie, because by existing it said: 'Observe the lengths we'll go to for your security. We'll even make you a movie about it.' Style instead of substance, the image instead of the reality
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Salman Rushdie |
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eaba2ef
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In the home of this music, alas, religious fanatics have lately started killing the musicians. They think the music is an insult to god, who gave us voices but does not wish us to sing, who gave us free will, rai, but prefers us not to be free.
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Salman Rushdie |
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d3526ba
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time, in my experience, has been as variable and inconstant as Bombay's electric power supply. Just telephone the speaking clock if you don't believe me - tied to electricity, it's usually a few hours wrong. Unless we're the ones who are wrong . . . 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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Salman Rushdie |
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103b305
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Rage made you the creature of those who enraged you, it gave them too much power. Rage killed the mind, and now more than ever the mind needed to live, to find a way of rising above the mindlessness.
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Salman Rushdie |
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de1aa65
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The enemy is stupid, he replied. That is ground for hope. There is no originality in tyrants, and they learn nothing from the demise of their precursors. They will be brutal and stifling and engender hatred and destroy what men love and that will defeat them. All important battles are, in the end, conflicts between hatred and love, and we must hold to the idea that love is stronger than hate.
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Salman Rushdie |
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6221a0e
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They drove past buses that dripped people the way a sponge drips water, and arrived at a thick forest of human beings, a crowd of people sprouting in all directions like leaves on jungle trees.
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Salman Rushdie |
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18b7759
|
In the end, rage, no matter how profoundly justified, destroys the enraged.
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Salman Rushdie |
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67a97ce
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So-called Islamic 'fundamentalism' does not spring, in Pakistan, from the people. It is imposed on them from above. Autocratic regimes find it useful to espouse the rhetoric of faith, because people respect that language, are reluctant to oppose it. This how religions shore up dictators; by encircling them with words of power, words which the people are reluctant to see discredited, disenfranchised, mocked. But the ramming-down-the-throat p..
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islam
revolution
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Salman Rushdie |
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7dda5d6
|
But where should he begin? - Well, then, the trouble with the English was their: Their: In a word, Gibreel solemnly pronounced, their weather. Gibreel Farishta floating on his cloud formed the opinion that the moral fuzziness of the English was meteorologically induced. 'When the day is not warmer than the night,' he reasoned, 'when the light is not brighter than the dark, when the land is not drier than the sea, then clearly a people will..
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Salman Rushdie |
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31603c6
|
I allowed myself the supernatural, the transcendent, because, I told myself, our love of metaphor is pre-religious, born of our need to express what is inexpressible, our dreams of otherness, of more.
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religion
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Salman Rushdie |