|
5376372
|
Happy birthday, Nicaragua. I drank a toast in the best rum in the world, Flor de Cana Extra Seco. Mixed with Coke, it was called a Nica-libre, and after a few glasses I was ready to take on the salsa champions and knock them dead. I went outside to dance.
|
|
|
Salman Rushdie |
|
95088b8
|
to admit we do not understand a phenomenon is not to admit the presence of the miraculous but merely, reasonably, to accept the limitations of human knowledge. God was invented to explain what our ancestors couldn't comprehend: the radiant mystery of being. The existence of the incomprehensible, however, is not a proof of god.
|
|
|
Salman Rushdie |
|
4d7071e
|
They are the Eggheads. He is the Walrus.
|
|
|
Salman Rushdie |
|
0be754d
|
And my grandfather... was forever knocked into that middle place, unable to worship a God in whose existence he could not wholly disbelieve. Permanent alteration: a hole.
|
|
|
Salman Rushdie |
|
20e90ae
|
Easily found, easily gathered, lives were the small change of this world, and if you lost a few, it didn't matter; there were always more.
|
|
|
Salman Rushdie |
|
ca42393
|
He knew that his father had finally run hard enough and long enough to wear down the frontiers between the worlds, he had run clear out of his skin and into the arms of his wife, to whom he had proved, once and for all, the superiority of his love. Some migrants are happy to depart.
|
|
love
|
Salman Rushdie |
|
62f6b1d
|
Rich kid," Shiva yelled, "you don't know one damn thing! What , man? What thing in the whole sister-sleeping world got , yara? For what reason you're rich and I'm poor? Where's the reason in starving, man? God knows how many millions of damn fools living in this country, man, and you think there's a purpose! Man, I'll tell you -- you got to get what you can, do what you can with it, and then you got to die. That's reason, rich boy. Everyt..
|
|
|
Salman Rushdie |
|
37b649d
|
Keep away from her," said Ameer Merchant, but once the inexorable dynamic of the mythic has been set in motion, you might as well try and keep bees from honey, crooks from money, politicians from babies, philosophers from maybes. Vina had her hooks in me, and the consequence was the story of my life."
|
|
|
Salman Rushdie |
|
0d4ea38
|
He was learning that to win a fight like this, it was not enough to know what one was fighting against. That was easy. He was fighting against the view that people could be killed for their ideas, and against the ability of any religion to place a limiting point on thought. But he needed, now, to be clear of what he was fighting for. Freedom of speech, freedom of the imagination, freedom from fear, and the beautiful, ancient art of which he..
|
|
|
Salman Rushdie |
|
ba7c9be
|
And so I returned to that city in which, in those last hours before reunions, Shaheed and I saw many things which were not true, which were not possible, because our boys would not could not have behaved so badly; we saw men in spectacles with heads like eggs being shot in side-streets, we saw the intelligentsia of the city being massacred by the hundred, but it was not true because it could not have been true, the Tiger was a decent chap, ..
|
|
|
Salman Rushdie |
|
67bd6cb
|
Bir yere ait olmayan insanlar ne olacak?" "Nereye? Nereye ait olmayan?" "Herhangi bir yere. Herhangi bir seye, herhangi bir kimseye. Fiziksel olarak bir bagi olmayanlar. Uzay boslugundaki kuyrukluyildizlar gibi hicbir cekim gucune tabi olmayanlar."
|
|
|
Salman Rushdie |
|
4560ab2
|
People retreated behind their front doors into the hidden zone of their private, family worlds and when outsiders asked how things were they answered, Oh, everything's going along just fine, not much to report, situation normal. But everyone secretly knew that behind that door things were rarely humdrum. More typically, all hell was breaking loose, as people dealt with their angry fathers, drunken mothers, resentful siblings, mad aunts, lec..
|
|
|
Salman Rushdie |
|
5a70934
|
Where they burn books they will in the end burn people too.
|
|
|
Salman Rushdie |
|
c77de30
|
To grow up steeped in these tellings was to learn two unforgettable lessons: first, that stories were not true (there were no "real" genies in bottles or flying carpets or wonderful lamps), but by being untrue they could make him feel and know truths that the truth could not tell him, and second, that they all belonged to him, just as they belonged to his father, Anis, and to everyone else, they were all his, as they were hsi father's, brig..
|
|
|
Salman Rushdie |
|
b64ea7c
|
the old are destroying the young by them to die in distant fields, and in response the young are destroying themselves.
|
|
|
Salman Rushdie |
|
d416a27
|
When he resigned his boss thought he was asking for more money. 'No,' he said. 'I'm just going to try to be a full-time writer.' Oh, his boss said, you want a more money. 'No, really,' he said. 'This isn't a negotiation. I'm just giving you my thirty days' notice. Thirty-one days from now, I won't be coming in.' Hmm, his boss replied. I don't think we can give you as much money as .
|
|
raises
resignation
|
Salman Rushdie |
|
fa6ca60
|
If a hungry dog looks for food, he does not look in the doghouse.
|
|
the-satanic-verses
|
Salman Rushdie |
|
1ac2a91
|
we can best understand the nature of this culture if we say that it found its truest mirror in a corpse
|
|
|
Salman Rushdie |
|
e155f18
|
And in Kandahar he was taught about survival, about fighting and killing and hunting, and he learned much else without being taught, such as looking out for himself and watching his tongue and not saying the wrong thing, the thing that might get him killed. About the dignity of the lost, about losing, and how it cleansed the soul to accept defeat, and about letting go, avoiding the trap of holding on too tightly to what you wanted, and abou..
|
|
survival
|
Salman Rushdie |
|
974a64c
|
Are you familiar," he said finally, "with the Bang?" "The Big Bang?" Luka asked. "Or some other Bang I don't know about?" "There was only one Bang," said Nobodaddy, "so the adjective Big is redundant and meaningless. The Bang would only be Big if there was at least one other Little or Medium-Sized or even Bigger Bang to compare it with, and to differentiate it from."
|
|
|
Salman Rushdie |
|
285140b
|
There is no bitterness like that of man who finds out he has been believing in a ghost.
|
|
loss-of-belief
bitterness
|
Salman Rushdie |
|
5559c3b
|
Methwold's hair, parted in the middle has a lot to do with my beginnings. It was one of those hairlines along which history and sexuality moved.
|
|
|
Salman Rushdie |
|
2019505
|
Human sanity was a poor, fragile thing at best,
|
|
|
Salman Rushdie |
|
8bbf239
|
Beware the man (or jinni) of action when he finally seeks to better himself with thought. A little thinking is a dangerous thing.
|
|
|
Salman Rushdie |
|
d515d63
|
In my stolen photographs -- for the photographer must be a thief, he must steal instants of other people's time to make his own tiny eternities -- it was this intimacy I sought, hte closeness of the living and the dead.
|
|
|
Salman Rushdie |
|
7815e0d
|
Honesty is not the best policy in life. Only, perhaps, in art.
|
|
|
Salman Rushdie |
|
adb0103
|
BOMBAY WAS CENTRAL, had been so from the moment of its creation: the bastard child of a Portuguese-English wedding, and yet the most Indian of Indian cities. In Bombay all Indias met and merged. In Bombay, too, all-India met what-was-not-India, what came across the black water to flow into our veins. Everything north of Bombay was North India, everything south of it was the South. To the east lay India's East and to the west, the world's We..
|
|
|
Salman Rushdie |
|
12f6419
|
En el exilio todo intento de arraigo se considera traicion: es el reconocimiento de la derrota.
|
|
|
Salman Rushdie |
|
3f34ef3
|
Did you know, ji,' Zulu offered, 'that the map of Tolkien's Middle earth fits quite well over central England and Wales? Maybe all fairylands are right here, in our midst.
|
|
tolkien
fairytale
wales
england
lord-of-the-rings
|
Salman Rushdie |
|
765a3f5
|
He needed her so badly, to reassure himself of his own existence, that he never comprehended the desperation in her dazzling, permanent smile, the terror in the brightness with which she faced the world, or the reasons why she hid when she couldn't manage to beam... every moment she spent in the world was full of panic, so she smiled and smiled and maybe once a week she locked the door and shook and felt like a husk, like an empty peanut-..
|
|
loneliness
sadness
masks
|
Salman Rushdie |
|
c10671a
|
This is known, and what is not known does not undermine it. This is the scientific way. To be open about the limits of one's knowledge increases public confidence in what one says is known.
|
|
|
Salman Rushdie |
|
d12c290
|
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
|
|
|
Salman Rushdie |
|
8abb713
|
You can lay your strategies as carefully as you like, but women will undo them at a stroke.
|
|
|
Salman Rushdie |
|
5d8b7ab
|
Genius was being born in her, filling the empty spaces in her bed, her heart, her womb. She needed no-one but herself.
|
|
|
Salman Rushdie |
|
12a8840
|
During his illness he had spent every minute of consciousness calling upon God, every second of every minute. Ya Allah whose servant lies bleeding do not abandon me now after watching oven me so long. Ya Allah show me some sign, some small mark of your favour, that I may find in myself the strength to cure my ills. O God most beneficent most merciful, be with me in this my time of need, my most grievous need. Then it occurred to him that he..
|
|
|
Salman Rushdie |
|
5b69cfc
|
the true direction of her heart: that is to say, inwards, to the reality of dreams.
|
|
|
Salman Rushdie |
|
45c13f2
|
All men needed to hear their stories told. He was a man, but if he died without telling the story he would be something less than that, an albino cockroach, a louse. The dungeon did not udnerstand the idea of as tory. The dungeon was static, eternal, black and a story needed motion adn tiem and light. He felt his story slipping away from him, beocming inconsequential, ceasing to be. He has no story. There was no story. He was not a man. The..
|
|
story
medical-humanities
narrative
|
Salman Rushdie |
|
71eb4ef
|
Who hopes for an hour hopes for eternity. The world in an hour. What follows is unseen.
|
|
|
Salman Rushdie |
|
9048d0a
|
She'd never shaken off the feeling of being damaged by her ignorance of Love, of what it might be like to be wholly possessed by the archetypal, capitalized djinn, the yearning towards, the blurring of the boundaries of the self, the unbuttoning, until you were open from your adam's-apple to your crotch: just words, because she didn't know the thing.
|
|
|
Salman Rushdie |
|
a17e6c4
|
Rashid did not give in. "Look how his hands move on the contols," he told her. "In those worlds left-handedness does not impede him. Amazingly, he is almost ambidextrous." Soraya snorted with annoyance. "Have you seen his handwriting?" she said. "Will his hedgehogs and plumbers help with that? Will his 'pisps' and 'wees' get him through school? Such names! They sound like going to the bathroom or what." Rashid began to smile placatingly. "T..
|
|
skills
video-games
|
Salman Rushdie |
|
4d3003c
|
Atata timp cat esti anesteziat si nu iti simti tragedia propriei vieti, poti supravietui. Cand iti revine limpezimea, cand iti este meticulos redata, te poate innebuni. memoria retrezita la viata te poate sminti, amintirea umilintei, a celor ce ti s-au intamplat fara stirea ta, a atator intruziuni, amintirea barbatilor. Nu un palat, ci un bordel al amintirilor, iar dincolo de aceste amintiri, constiinta faptului ca toti cei care te-au iubit..
|
|
|
Salman Rushdie |
|
f1c1168
|
Even if Shaheed had been able to hear me, I could not then have told him what I later became convinced was the truth: that the purpose of that entire war had been to reunite me with an old life, to bring me back together with my old friends. Sam Manekshaw was marching on Dacca, to meet his old friend the Tiger; and the modes of connection lingered on, because on the field of leaking bone-marrow I heard about the exploits of knees, and was g..
|
|
|
Salman Rushdie |
|
5886dfc
|
What kind of God is it who's upset by a cartoon in Danish?
|
|
religion
god
mohammed-cartoons
freedom-of-expression
orthodoxy
satire
|
Salman Rushdie |
|
8e13136
|
These stories become what we know, what we understand, and what we are, or, perhaps we should say, what we have become, or can perhaps be.
|
|
storytelling
|
Salman Rushdie |