“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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“She was old and crankily conservative in the way only old liberals could be.”
― John Scalzi, quote from Lock In
“Ram became revered because he functioned on the basis of the principle that life was not just about pleasure and hoarding things: it was about finding meaning and purpose.”
― Devdutt Pattanaik, quote from Sita: An Illustrated Retelling of the Ramayana
“I’ve found that falling asleep is the best way to politely excuse yourself from an unwanted interaction.”
― quote from White Girl Problems
“In this chapter, I want to focus on the really big crimes that have been committed by atheist groups and governments. In the past hundred years or so, the most powerful atheist regimes—Communist Russia, Communist China, and Nazi Germany—have wiped out people in astronomical numbers. Stalin was responsible for around twenty million deaths, produced through mass slayings, forced labor camps, show trials followed by firing squads, population relocation and starvation, and so on. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s authoritative recent study Mao: The Unknown Story attributes to Mao Zedong’s regime a staggering seventy million deaths.4 Some China scholars think Chang and Halliday’s numbers are a bit high, but the authors present convincing evidence that Mao’s atheist regime was the most murderous in world history. Stalin’s and Mao’s killings—unlike those of, say, the Crusades or the Thirty Years’ War—were done in peacetime and were performed on their fellow countrymen. Hitler comes in a distant third with around ten million murders, six million of them Jews. So far, I haven’t even counted the assassinations and slayings ordered by other Soviet dictators like Lenin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and so on. Nor have I included a host of “lesser” atheist tyrants: Pol Pot, Enver Hoxha, Nicolae Ceaus̹escu, Fidel Castro, Kim Jong-il. Even these “minor league” despots killed a lot of people. Consider Pol Pot, who was the leader of the Khmer Rouge, the Communist Party faction that ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. Within this four-year period Pol Pot and his revolutionary ideologues engaged in systematic mass relocations and killings that eliminated approximately one-fifth of the Cambodian population, an estimated 1.5 million to 2 million people. In fact, Pol Pot killed a larger percentage of his countrymen than Stalin and Mao killed of theirs.5 Even so, focusing only on the big three—Stalin, Hitler, and Mao—we have to recognize that atheist regimes have in a single century murdered more than one hundred million people.”
― Dinesh D'Souza, quote from What's So Great About Christianity
“I mean, what are you going to do to him for shooting your dog?” “I will do nothing. I won’t hurt my brother. He acted like a child. He did a bad thing. But he is drunk and his head is not working well. He should not have hurt my dog. It is like my child.” Even when provoked, as Kaaboogí was now, the Pirahãs were able to respond with patience, love, and understanding, in ways rarely matched in any other culture I have encountered.”
― Daniel L. Everett, quote from Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle
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Lola and the Boy Nex...BookQuoters 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.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
