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4066143
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Sometimes we feel we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools.
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diaspora
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Salman Rushdie |
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e7c192e
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When you know what you're against you have taken the first step to discovering what you're for.
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Salman Rushdie |
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1ef1d53
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Give up on me " he begged her. "I don't like people dropping in to see me without warning, I have forgotten the rules of seven tiles and kabaddi, I can't recite my prayers, I don't know what should happen at a nikah ceremony, and in this city where I grew up I get lost if I'm on my own. This isn't home. It makes me giddy because it feels like home and is not. It makes my heart tremble and my head spin." "You're a stupid, " she shouted at hi..
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Salman Rushdie |
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bb07a3f
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A change in direction was required. The story you finished was perhaps never the one you began. Yes! He would take charge of his life anew, binding his breaking selves together. Those changes in himself that he sought, he himself would initiate and make them. No more of this miasmic, absent drift. How had he ever persuaded himself that his money-mad burg would rescue him all by itself, this Gotham in which Jokers and Penguins were running r..
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Salman Rushdie |
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a7c59d9
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All true believers have good reasons for disbelieving in every god except their own,' said Birbal, 'and so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in none.
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god
religion
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Salman Rushdie |
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29b1dda
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Any story worth its salt can handle a little shaking up.
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Salman Rushdie |
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5d83a0b
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In the end, rage, no matter how profoundly justified, destroys the enraged. Just as we are created anew by what we love, so we are reduced and unmade by what we hate.
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Salman Rushdie |
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bbbb3bf
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Between shame and shamelessness lies the axis upon which we turn; meteorological conditions at both these poles are of the most extreme, ferocious type. Shamelessness, shame: the roots of violence.
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Salman Rushdie |
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1df3574
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What's the use of stories that aren't even true?
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Salman Rushdie |
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d113125
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But human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions. Partial beings, in all the senses of that phrase. Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inade..
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Salman Rushdie |
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7d7d687
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You can get anywhere in Pakistan if you know people, even into jail.
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pakistan
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Salman Rushdie |
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bfc06f4
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Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another's, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.
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stories
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Salman Rushdie |
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93bd646
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All migrants leave their pasts behind, although some try to pack it into bundles and boxes-but on the journey something seeps out of the treasured mementoes and old photographs, until even their owners fail to recognize them, because it is the fate of migrants to be stripped of history, to stand naked amidst the scorn of strangers upon whom they see rich clothing, the brocades of continuity and the eyebrows of belonging..
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Salman Rushdie |
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a2faf97
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When you pray for what you most want in the world, its opposite comes along with it. I was given a woman whom I truly loved and who truly loved me. The opposite side of such a love is the pain of its loss. I can only feel such pain today because until yesterday I knew that love.
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love
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Salman Rushdie |
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4af0cea
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Abraham Zogoiby covered his face that night in August 1939 because he had been assailed by fear, [...] a sudden apprehension that the ugliness of life might defeat its beauty; that love did not make lovers invulnerable. Nevertheless, he thought, even if the world's beauty and love were on the edge of destruction, theirs would still be the only side to be on; defeated love would still be love, hate's victory would not make it other than it w..
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Salman Rushdie |
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a489c83
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Freedom is not a tea party, India. Freedom is a war.
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Salman Rushdie |
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89342dd
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Sometimes by a woodland stream he watched the water rush over the pebbled bed, its tiny modulations of bounce and flow. A woman's body was like that. If you watched it carefully enough you could see how it moved to the rhythm of the world, the deep rhythm, the music below the music, the truth below the truth. He believed in this hidden truth the way other men believed in God or love, believed that truth was in fact always hidden, that the a..
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Salman Rushdie |
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e4dd9a2
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for those who value stability, who fear transience, uncertainty, change, have erected a powerful system of stigmas and taboos against rootlessness, that disruptive, anti-social force, so that we mostly conform, we pretend to be motivated by loyalties and solidarities we do not really feel, we hide our secret identities beneath the false skins of those identities which bear the belongers' seal of approval. But the truth leaks out in our drea..
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Salman Rushdie |
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8a4330e
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My heart broke open and history fell in.
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Salman Rushdie |
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8cb02a9
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One Kashmiri morning in the early spring of 1915, my grandfather Aadam Aziz hit his nose against a frost-hardened tussock of earth while attempting to pray. Three drops of blood plopped out of his left nostril, hardened instantly in the brittle air and lay before his eyes on the prayer-mat, transformed into rubies. Lurching back until he knelt with his head once more upright, he found that the tears which had sprung to his eyes had solidifi..
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Salman Rushdie |
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130e966
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A people that has remained convinced of its greatness and invulnerability, that has chosen to believe such a myth in the face of all the evidence, is a people in the grip of a kind of sleep, or madness.
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Salman Rushdie |
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b16106a
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They lived in a great city, a metropolis of many narratives that converged briefly and then separated for ever, discovering their different dooms in that crowd of stories through which all of us, following our own destinies, had to push and shove to find our way through, or out.
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Salman Rushdie |
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eaf97e5
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This may be the curse of human race . Not that we are different from one anther , but we are so alike .
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Salman Rushdie |
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2a7e18e
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A man who catches History's eye is thereafter bound to a mistress from whom he will never escape.
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history
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Salman Rushdie |
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15ba25f
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When we stop believing in the gods we can start believing in their stories.
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Salman Rushdie |
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690cbca
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Life is fury, he'd thought. Fury -- sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal -- drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths. Out of furia comes creation, inspiration, originality, passion, but also violence, pain, pure unafraid destruction, the giving and receiving of blows from which we never recover. The Furies pursue us; Shiva dances his furious dance to create and also to destroy. But never mind about gods! Sara ranting at hi..
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Salman Rushdie |
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341b0ea
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It is all for love. Which is a wonderful and dashing matter. But which can also be a very foolish thing.
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Salman Rushdie |
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7ee6f3f
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Iff replied that the Plentimaw Fishes were what he called 'hunger artists' -- 'Because when they are hungry they swallow stories through every mouth, and in their innards miracles occur; a little bit of one story joins on to an idea from another, and hey presto, when they spew the stories out they are not the old tales but new ones. Nothing comes from nothing, Thieflet; no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old -- it is the..
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surrealism
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Salman Rushdie |
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adceb3e
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If love is a yearning to be like (even to become) the beloved, then hatred, it must be said, can be engendered by the same ambition, when it cannot be fulfilled.
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Salman Rushdie |
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e0bf215
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Captain Ahab drowned, he reminded himself; it was the trimmer, Ishmael, who survived.
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Salman Rushdie |
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d78da70
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This is how we are: we fall in love with each other's strengths, but love deepens towards permanence when we fall in love with each other's weaknesses.
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finding-strength-in-love
human-nature
love
love-that-lasts
lovers
philosophy-of-love
romance
strength
weakness
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Salman Rushdie |
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5080a03
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He remembered the old Chinese proverb, sometimes ascribed to Confucius: If you sit by the river for long enough, the body of your enemy will float by.
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life
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Salman Rushdie |
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0455171
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All liberty required was that the space for discourse itself be protected. Liberty lay in the argument itself, not the resolution of that argument, in the ability to quarrel, even with the most cherished beliefs of others; a free society was not placid but turbulent. The bazaar of conflicting was the place where freedom rang.
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liberty
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Salman Rushdie |
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2b35810
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I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you'll have to swallow the lot as well.
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Salman Rushdie |
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70b81aa
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When we stop believing in gods we can start believing in their stories, I retort. There are of course no such things as miracles, but if there were and so tomorrow we woke up to find no more believers on earth, no more devout Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, why then, sure the beauty of the stories would be a thing we could focus on because they wouldn't be dangerous any more, they would become capable of compelling the only belief that l..
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Salman Rushdie |
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ba306e8
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Believe in your own eyes and you'll get into a lot of trouble, hot water, a mess.
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Salman Rushdie |
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dc3bd7a
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All names mean something.
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Salman Rushdie |
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0c77f63
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Once upon a time there was a mother who, in order to become a mother, had agreed to change her name; who set herself the task of falling in love with her husband bit-by-bit, but who could n ever manage to love one part, the part, curiously enough, which made possible her motherhood; whose feet were hobbled by verrucas and whose shoulders were stooped beneath the accumulating guilts of the world; whose husband's unlovable organ failed to rec..
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love
motherhood
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Salman Rushdie |
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4405039
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Do not start me on
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literary-criticism
novels
the-davinci-code
writing
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Salman Rushdie |
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3ca36fe
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I have been only the humblest jugglers-with-facts; and that, in a country where the truth is what it is instructed to be, reality quite literally ceases to exist, so that everything becomes possible except what we are told is the case; and maybe this was the difference between my Indian childhood and Pakistani adolescence--that in the first I was beset by an infinity of alternative realities, while in the second I was adrift, disoriented, a..
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Salman Rushdie |
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c92c87b
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The fact of being alive compensated for what life did to one.
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Salman Rushdie |
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376061b
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A little bird whispers in my ear: "Be fair! Nobody, no country, has a monopoly of untruth." --
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Salman Rushdie |
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b150008
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At the beginning of all love there is a private treaty each of the lovers make with himself or herself, an agreement to set aside what is wrong with the other for the sake of what is right. Love is spring after winter. It comes to heal life's wounds, inflicted by the unloving cold. When that warmth is born in the heart the imperfections of the beloved are as nothing, less than nothing, and the secret treaty with oneself is easy to sign. The..
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Salman Rushdie |
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a23f41a
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What had been (at the beginning) no bigger than a full stop had expanded into a comma, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter; now it was bursting into more complex developments, becoming, one might say, a book - perhaps an encylopaedia - even a whole language...
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Salman Rushdie |