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3f1bf91
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It seems there is no such thing as a purely good deed, a completely right action. Even this task, which i took on for the very best of reasons, involves making choices that are not that "good", choices that might even be "wrong"."
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Salman Rushdie |
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4baeee0
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human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions
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memory
writers
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Salman Rushdie |
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e8eb76c
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A son who will never be older than his motherland - neither older nor younger. There shall be two heads - but you will only see one - there will be knees and a nose, a nose and knees. Newspaper praises him, two mothers raise him! Bicycles love him - but crowds will shove him! Sisters will weep, cobras will creep... Washing will hide him - voices will guide him! Friends will mutilate him - blood will betray him! Spittoons will brain him - do..
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Salman Rushdie |
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a4ff9b4
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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 ens, stories end, life ends, at the finish of everything we use his name. 'It is finished,' we tell one another, 'it's over, Khattam-Shud; the end.
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Salman Rushdie |
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b2b9303
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He had picked up languages the way most sailors pick up diseases; languages were his gonorrhoea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague, his plague.
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Salman Rushdie |
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af1d3bf
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Be so good as to cease to cast yourself in fictions. Pinch yourself, or slap yourself across the face if that's what it takes, but understand, please, that you are nonfictional, and this is real life.
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Salman Rushdie |
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de9f917
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The only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step outside the frame.
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clear-mindedness
clear-view
outside-the-box
perception
view-from-outside
whole-picture
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Salman Rushdie |
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006d339
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I, too, have ropes around my neck. I have them to this day, pulling me this way and that, East and West, the nooses tightening, commanding, choose, choose. I buck, I snort, I whinny, I rear, Ikick. Ropes, I do not choose between you. Lassoes, lariats, I choose neither of you, and both. Doyou hear? I refuse to choose.
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Salman Rushdie |
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d70dc18
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Nobody can judge an internal injury," he had said, "by the size of the superficial wound, of the hole."
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Salman Rushdie |
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bbe8994
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America had left reality behind and entered the comic-book universe.
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Salman Rushdie |
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76748bf
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We strive for heights bit our natures betray us, Chamcha thought; clowns in search of crowns. The bitterness overcame him
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Salman Rushdie |
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d8d2130
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Roots, I sometimes think, are a conservative myth, designed to keep us in our places.
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Salman Rushdie |
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b9526c2
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Zembla, Zenda, Xanadu: All our dream-worlds may come true. Fairy lands are fearsome too.
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Salman Rushdie |
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c7b6298
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Why obliterate the exceptional merely in order to make the outstanding look finer than it was?
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Salman Rushdie |
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9009867
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What's a ,,culture"? Look it up. ,,A group of micro-organisms grown in a nutrient substance under controlled conditions". A squirm of germs on a glass slide is all, a laboratory experiment calling itself a society. Most of us wrigglers make do with life on the slide; we even agree to feel proud of that ,,culture". Like slaves voting for slavery or brains for lobotomy, we kneel down before the god of all moronic micro-organisms and pray to b..
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Salman Rushdie |
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d998e92
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The point is always reached after which the gods no longer share their lives with mortal men and women, they die or wither away or retire... Now that they've gone, the high drama's over. What remains is ordinary human life.
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Salman Rushdie |
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db92bbc
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The actor's life offers, on a daily basis, the simulacrum of love; a mask can be satisfied, or at least consoled, by the echo of what it seeks.
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Salman Rushdie |
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0da52d2
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Because if the whole universe could just explode out of Nothing and then just Be, don't you see that the opposite could also be true? That it is possible to implode and Un-Be as well as to explode and Be? That it's possible to implode and Un-Be as well as to explode and Be? That all human beings, Napoleon Bonaparte, for example, or the emperor Akbar, or Angelina Jolie or your father, could simply return to Nothing once they're...done? In a ..
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Salman Rushdie |
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222f2a5
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If I seem a little bizarre, remember the wild profusion of my inheritance...perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque.
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Salman Rushdie |
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2e771de
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When Alice fell down the rabbit hole, it was an accident, but when she stepped through the looking glass, it was of her own free will, and a braver deed by far.
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Salman Rushdie |
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5d5e49f
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This was what was left of a human individual when you took away his home,his family, his friends, his city, his country,his world: a being without context, whose past had faded, whose future was bleak, an entity stripped of name, of meaning,of the whole of life except a temporarily beating heart.
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Salman Rushdie |
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5536f0b
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History could claw upward as well as down. The powerful could be deafened by the cries of the poor.
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Salman Rushdie |
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235c153
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that witchcraft requires no potions, familiar spirits, or magic wands. Language upon a silver tongue affords enchantment enough.
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charm
language
magic
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Salman Rushdie |
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17c5496
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You'll say things all wrong but they'll at once become American ways of saying things. You won't know shit but it'll right away become an American type of ignorance. Not belonging, that's an old American tradition, see?, that's the American way.
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Salman Rushdie |
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f0cc8ec
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Knowledge was never simply born in the human mind; it was always reborn. The relaying of wisdom from one age to the next, this cycle of rebirths: this was wisdom.
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Salman Rushdie |
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b4f2f37
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He was the child of a father who was not his father; but also the child of a time which damaged reality so badly that nobody ever managed to put it together again;
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Salman Rushdie |
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5cf4565
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More seriously-and this is probably why there has been a lot of garbage talked about a lost generation-it was easy to see, all over the landscape of contemporary fiction, the devastating effect of the Thatcher years. So many of these writers wrote without hope. They had lost all ambition, all desire to to wrestle with the world. Their books dealt with tiny patches of the world, tiny pieces of human experience-a council estate, a mother, a f..
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Salman Rushdie |
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b7a3c4f
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Otto Cone as a man of seventy-plus years jumped into an open lift shaft and died. Now this was a subject which Alicia Cone, who would readily discuss the most taboo matters refused to touch upon. Why does a survivor of the camps live forty years then complete the job the monsters didn't get done? Does great evil eventually triumph no matter how strenuously it is resisted? Does it leave a sliver of ice in the blood working its way through un..
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Salman Rushdie |
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6e0928e
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When you're whirling free of the mother ship, when you cut your ropes, slip your chain, step off the map, go absent without leave, scram, vamoose, whatever; suppose that it's then, and only then, that you're actually free to act! To lead the life nobody tells you how to live, or when, or why. In which nobody orders you to go forth and die for them, or for god, or comes to get you because you broke one of the rules, or because you're one of ..
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Salman Rushdie |
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d5104ca
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How does one live amongst one's fellow countrymen and countrywomen when you don't know which of them is numbered amongst the sixty-million-plus who brought the horror to power, when you can't tell who should be counted among the ninety-million-plus who shrugged and stayed home, or when your fellow Americans tell you that knowing things is elitist and they hate elites, and all you have ever had is your mind and you were brought up to believe..
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Salman Rushdie |
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a29c11b
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Hey you, long face,' shouted an elderly gent who must have been at least seventy years old, but who was dancing through the flooded, rainy streets, waving a rolled umbrella like a sword. 'Don't you sing those Tragedy Songs round here.
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Salman Rushdie |
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3eac84a
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To understand just one life you have to swallow the world.
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Salman Rushdie |
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e3c25ff
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Naught but love makes magic real.
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Salman Rushdie |
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37df446
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Also, on account of the odd relationship between time and space, the people who do manage to time-jump sometimes space-jump at the same time and end up in places where they simply don't belong. Over there, for example," he said as a raucous DeLorean sports car rared into view from nowhere, "is that crazy American professorwho can't seem to stay put in one time, and, I must say, there is an absolute plague of of killer robots from the future..
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luka
rashid-khalifa
rushdie
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Salman Rushdie |
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47ade59
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Why, alone of all the more-than-five-hundred-million, should I have to bear the burden of history?
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Salman Rushdie |
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8a4947e
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PLEASE BELIEVE that I am falling apart. I am not speaking metaphorically; nor is this the opening gambit of some melodramatic, riddling, grubby appeal for pity. I mean quite simply that I have begun to crack all over like an old jug--that my poor body, singular, unlovely, buffeted by too much history, subjected to drainage above and drainage below, mutilated by doors, brained by spittoons, has started coming apart at the seams. In short, I ..
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Salman Rushdie |
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1fd7b83
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let me belong again to that faraway place I left so long ago, from which I am alienated, and which has forgotten me, in which I am an alien now even though it was the place where I began, let me belong again, walk those streets knowing they are mine, knowing that my story is a part of those streets, even though it isn't, it hasn't been for most of a lifetime, let it be so, let it be so
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homesickness
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Salman Rushdie |
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e8688b6
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Good advice Is Rarer Than Rubies
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Salman Rushdie |
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667ca81
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If you want pay, then just be gay.
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Salman Rushdie |
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3bb3d99
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Two things form the bedrock of any open society -- freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don't have those things, you don't have a free country." [
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freedom-of-expression
freedom-of-speech
open-society
politics
rule-of-law
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Salman Rushdie |
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65884aa
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How far did they fly? Five and a half thousand as the crow. Or: from Indianness to Englishness, an immeasurable distance. Or, not very far at all, because they rose from one great city, fell to another. The distance between cities is always small; a villager, travelling a hundred miles to town, traverses emptier, darker, more terrifying space.
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Salman Rushdie |
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167d6ed
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Faced with the blazing magnificence of the everyday, the artist is both humbled and provoked. There are photographs now of events on an unimaginable scale [...] When we look at these images, there is, yes, legitimate wonderment at our own lengthening reach and grasp. But it would be vain indeed to praise our puny handiwork--the mastery of the Hubble wielders, the computer enhancers, the colorizers, all the true-life-fantasist counterparts o..
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Salman Rushdie |
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185f63d
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mingling with the remains of the plane, equally fragmented, equally absurd, there floated the debris of the soul, broken memories, sloughed-off selves, severed mother tongues, violated privacies, untranslatable jokes, extinguished futures, lost loves, the forgotten meaning of hollow, booming words, land, belonging, home.
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migrants
migration
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Salman Rushdie |
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0cc7b20
|
Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible. Suppose yourself in a large cinema, sitting at first in the back row, and gradually moving up, row by row, until your nose is almost pressed against the screen. Gradually the stars' faces dissolve into dancing grain; tiny details assume grotesque pr..
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Salman Rushdie |