Quotes from The Moor's Last Sigh

“A sigh isn't just a sigh. We inhale the world and breathe out meaning. While we can. While we can.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Moor's Last Sigh

“We crave permission openly to become our secret selves.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Moor's Last Sigh

“How to forgive the world for its beauty, which merely disguises its ugliness; for its gentleness, which merely cloaks its cruelty; for its illusion of continuity, seamlessly, as the night follows the day, so to speak- whereas in reality life is a series of brutal raptures, falling upon your defenseless hands, like the blows of a woodman's axe?”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Moor's Last Sigh

“we look up and we hope the stars look down, we pray that there may be stars for us to follow, stars moving across the heavens and leading us to our destiny, but it's only our vanity. We look at the galaxy and fall in love, but the universe cares less about us than we do about it, and the stars stay in their courses however much we may wish upon them to do otherwise. It's true that if you watch the sky-wheel turn for a while you'll see a meteor fall, flame and die. That's not a star worth following; it's just an unlucky rock. Our fates are here on earth. There are no guiding stars.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Moor's Last Sigh

“Ignorantly is how we all fall in love; for it is a kind of fall. Closing our eyes, we leap from that cliff in hope of a soft landing. Nor is it always soft; but still, without that leap nobody comes to life.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Moor's Last Sigh

“I had become a kind of information magpie, gathering to myself all manner of shiny scraps of fact and hokum and books and art-history and politics and music and film, and developing, too, a certain skill in manipulating and arranging these pitiful shards so that they glittered and caught the light. Fool's gold, or priceless nuggets mined from my singular childhood's rich bohemian seam? I leave it to others to decide.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Moor's Last Sigh

“If a birth is the fall-out from the explosion caused by the union of two unstable elements, then perhaps a half-life is all we can expect. ”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Moor's Last Sigh

“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 was. ”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Moor's Last Sigh

“I, however, was raised neither as Catholic nor as Jew. I was both, and nothing: a jewholic-anonymous, a cathjew nut, a stewpot, a mongrel cur. I was--what's the word these days?--atomised. Yessir: a real Bombay mix. ”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Moor's Last Sigh

“they came in search of the hot stuff, just like any man calling on a tart.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Moor's Last Sigh

“I'll tell you a secret about fear: it's an absolutist. With fear, it's all or nothing. Either, like any bullying tyrant, it rules your life with stupid blinding omnipotence, or else you overthrow it, and its power vanishes in a puff of smoke. And another secret: the revolution against fear, the engendering of that tawdry despot's fall, has more or less nothing to do with 'courage'. It is driven by something much more straightforward: the simple need to get on with your life.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Moor's Last Sigh

“...the true direction of her heart: that is to say, inwards, to the reality of dreams.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Moor's Last Sigh

“We, the living, must find what space we can alongside them; the giant dead whom we cannot tie down, though we grasp at their hair, though we rope them while they sleep”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Moor's Last Sigh

“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, quote from The Moor's Last Sigh

“In spite of all my efforts to create a neat, tidy, obedient, moderate, unexceptional persona, I was simply
too weird for them; until that is, my first female tutor was hired.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Moor's Last Sigh

“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 West. Bombay was central; all rivers flowed into its human sea. It was an ocean of stories; we were all its narrators, and everybody talked at once.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Moor's Last Sigh

“We look at the galaxy and fall in love, but the universe cares less about us than we do about it, and the stars stay in their courses however much we may wish upon them to do otherwise. It’s true that if you watch the sky-wheel turn for a while you’ll see a meteor fall, flame and die. That’s not a star worth following; it’s just an unlucky rock. Our fates are here on earth. There are no guiding stars.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Moor's Last Sigh

“There is a thing that lives in us, eating our food, breathing our air, looking out through our eyes, and when it comes out to play nobody is immune; possessed, we turn murderously upon one another, thing-darkness in our eyes and real weapons in our hands, neighbour against thing-ridden neighbour, thing-driven cousin against cousin, brother-thing against brother-thing, thing-child against thing-child.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Moor's Last Sigh

“In my family we've always found the world's air hard to breathe; we arrive hoping for somewhere better.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Moor's Last Sigh

“And so, out of bloody-mindedness, I had said the word, and we went for the first time, into those Bombay Central alleys that have no name. Lamba introduced me simply as ‘The Moor’, and because I came with him there was less contempt than I had expected.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Moor's Last Sigh

“Pepper it was that brought Vasco da Gama's tall ships across the ocean, from Lisbon's Tower of Belem to the Malabar Coast: first to Calicut and later, for its lagoony harbour, to Cochin. English and French sailed in the wake of that first-arrived Portugee, so that in the period called Discovery-of-India — but how could we be discovered when we were not
covered before? — we were 'not so much sub-continent as sub-condiment', as my distinguished mother had it.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Moor's Last Sigh

“Yes, I know there is a fashion nowadays for these Hitler's-valet type memoirs, and many people are against, they say we should not humanise the inhuman. But the point is they are not inhuman, these Mainduck-style little Hitlers, and it is in their humanity that we must locate our collective guilt, humanity's guilt for human beings' misdeeds; for if they are just monsters - if it is just a question of King Kong and Godzilla wreaking havoc until the aeroplanes bring them down - then the rest of us are excused.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Moor's Last Sigh

“I'll drink some wine, and then, like a latter-day Van Winkle, I'll lay me down upon this graven stone, lay my head beneath these letters RIP, and close my eyes, according to our family's old practice of falling asleep in times of trouble, and hope to awaken, renewed and joyful, into a better time.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Moor's Last Sigh

“…it is a matter of record that in our sorry age with its prejudice in favour of male children many poor families donated to their favoured cult-temple the daughters they could not afford to marry off or feed, in the hope that they might live in holiness as servants or, if they were fortunate, as dancers; vain hopes, alas, for in many cases the priests in charge of these temples were men in whom the highest standards of probity were mysteriously absent, a failing which laid them open to offers of cash on the nail for the young virgins and not-quite-virgins and once-again-virgins in their charge. Thus Abraham the spice merchant was able to use his widespread Southern connections to harvest a new crop, entered in his most secret ledgers as 'Garam Masala Super Quality', and also, I note with some embarrassment, 'Extra Hot Chilli Peppers: Green.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Moor's Last Sigh

“Civilsation is the sleight of hand that conceals our natures from ourselves.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Moor's Last Sigh

“Call it Mooristan,’ Aurora told me. ‘This seaside, this hill, with the fort on top. Water-gardens and hanging gardens, watchtowers and towers of silence too. Place where worlds collide, flow in and out of one another, and washofy away. Place where an air-man can drowno in water, or else grow gills; where a water-creature can get drunk, but also chokeofy, on air.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Moor's Last Sigh

“Kaçarken bir yandan ipuçlarıyla dolu bir korsan
haritasına, üzerindeki X işaretlerinin şahsımdan mürekkep bir hazineyi işaret ettiği korsan haritama çevirdim dünyayı. Peşimdekiler bıraktığım izleri sürüp geldikleri zaman beni şikâyetsiz, soluksuz, hazır bekler bulacaklar.
İşte burada duruyorum. Olacağı buydu.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Moor's Last Sigh

“Yalnız benim (renkli ve gösterişli olmasına rağmen) pek uzun sayılamayacak hayatımın sonunda, çivileyip asacak tezlerim taze bitti. Hayat da çarmıha çivilenmekten pek farklı değil zaten.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Moor's Last Sigh

“İnsan sıfırı tüketmeye yaklaşınca, adım atmaya mecali kalmayınca, günah çıkarma zamanı gelmiş demektir. İster vasiyet deyin ister (hür) irade – veya yaşamın Son Soluk Salonu. Hayatıma dair hükümleri yollar boyunca
bulduğum her yere çiviledikten sonra, cebimde kızıl bir kalenin anahtarlarıyla burada durmamın – daha doğrusu oturmamın nedeni bu işte; nihai teslimiyetten önceki bekleyiş anlarını geçirmek.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Moor's Last Sigh

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