“I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I'm gone which would not have happened if I had not come.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from Midnight's Children
“Memory's truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from Midnight's Children
“We all owe death a life.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from Midnight's Children
“To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from Midnight's Children
“What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from Midnight's Children
“Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from Midnight's Children
“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.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from Midnight's Children
“What can't be cured must be endured.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from Midnight's Children
“Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from Midnight's Children
“Who what am I? My answer: I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I’ve gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each ‘I’, every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you’ll have to swallow the world.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from Midnight's Children
“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.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from Midnight's Children
“To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from Midnight's Children
“I learned: the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from Midnight's Children
“Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from Midnight's Children
“I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from Midnight's Children
“Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each "I", everyone of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from Midnight's Children
“perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from Midnight's Children
“Things, even people have a way of leaking into each other like flavours when you cook.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from Midnight's Children
“Unless, of course, there's no such thing as chance;...in which case, we should either-optimistically-get up and cheer, because if everything is planned in advance, then we all have a meaning and are spared the terror of knowing ourselves to be random, without a why; or else, of course, we might-as pessimists-give up right here and now, understanding the futility of thought decision action, since nothing we think makes any difference anyway, things will be as they will. Where, then, is optimism? In fate or in chaos?”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from Midnight's Children
“What you were is forever who you are.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from Midnight's Children
“For every snake, there is a ladder; for every ladder,a snake”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from Midnight's Children
“Everything has shape, if you look for it. There is no escape from form.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from Midnight's Children
“India, the new myth--a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from Midnight's Children
“There is nothing like a War for the reinvention of lives...”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from Midnight's Children
“...because silence, too, has an echo, hollower and longer-lasting than the reverberations of any sound.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from Midnight's Children
“What grows best in the heat: fantasy; unreason; lust.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from Midnight's Children
“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.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from Midnight's Children
“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...”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from Midnight's Children
“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, amid an equally infinite number of falsenesses, unrealities and lies.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from Midnight's Children
Salman Rushdie
Born place: in Bombay, India
Born date June 19, 1947
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“Don't worry about things that you simply cannot know. Let them fall back and recede like the foam pushed aside by the flanks of a ship. Leave them behind and let your heart power on.”
― Mark Helprin, quote from Freddy and Fredericka
“The Bostonians is special because it never was ‘titivated’ for the New York edition, for its humour and its physicality, for its direct engagement with social and political issues and the way it dramatized them, and finally for the extent to which its setting and action involved the author and his sense of himself. But the passage above suggests one other source of its unique quality. It has been called a comedy and a satire – which it is. But it is also a tragedy, and a moving one at that. If its freshness, humour, physicality and political relevance all combine to make it a peculiarly accessible and enjoyable novel, it is also an upsetting and disturbing one, not simply in its treatment of Olive, but also of what she tries to stand for. (Miss Birdseye is an important figure in this respect: built up and knocked down as she is almost by fits and starts.) The book’s jaundiced view of what Verena calls ‘the Heart of humanity’ (chapter 28) – reform, progress and the liberal collectivism which seems so essential an ingredient in modern democracy – makes it contentious to this day. An aura of scepticism about the entire political process hangs about it: salutary some may say; destructive according to others. And so, more than any other novel of James’s, it reminds us of the literature of our own time. The Bostonians is one of the most brilliant novels in the English language, as F. R. Leavis remarked;27 but it is also one of the bleakest. In no other novel did James reveal more of himself, his society and his era, and of the human condition, caught as it is between the blind necessity of progress and the urge to retain the old. It is a remarkably experimental modern novel, written by a man of conservative values. It is judgemental about people with whom its author identified, and lenient towards attitudes hostile to large areas of James’s own intellectual and personal inheritance. The strength of the contradictions embodied in the novel are a guarantee of the pleasure it has to give.”
― Henry James, quote from The Bostonians
“The sin of smiling whilst Louise was weeping, the sin of shedding my own tears and not hers. The sin of being another being.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, quote from The Blood of Others
“In this time, I learned for myself as my teacher predicted, how it is these two extremes - that we are transported by love and jailed by it - that are ever impossible for mothers to reconcile.”
― Kate Manning, quote from My Notorious Life
“Most ideas are born and lost in isolation.”
― quote from Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality
The Melancholy Death...
Transfer of Power
A Game of You
Tempting the Beast
An Object of BeautyBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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