Quotes from The Satanic Verses

“Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Satanic Verses

“Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Satanic Verses

“What kind of idea are you? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accomodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damnfool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? – The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of hundred, be smashed to bits; but, the hundredth time, will change the world.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Satanic Verses

“Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Satanic Verses

“The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Satanic Verses

“You can't judge an internal injury by the size of the hole.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Satanic Verses

“Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet...Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Satanic Verses

“Not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite; our hopes spill over its rim.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Satanic Verses

“Question: What is the opposite of faith?

Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself is a kind of belief.

Doubt.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Satanic Verses

“Question: What is the opposite of faith?

Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself is a kind of belief.

Doubt.

The human condition, but what of the angelic? Halfway between Allahgod and homosap, did they ever doubt? They did: challenging God's will one day they hid muttering beneath the Throne, daring to ask forbidden things: antiquestions. Is it right that. Could it not be argued. Freedom, the old antiquest. He calmed them down, naturally, employing management skills a la god. Flattered them: you will be the instruments of my will on earth, the salvationdamnation of man, all the usual etcetera. And hey presto, the end of protest, on with the haloes, back to work. Angels are easily pacified; turn them into instruments and they'll play your harpy tune. Human beings are tougher nuts, can doubt anything, even the evidence of their own eyes. Of behing-their-own-eyes. Of what, as they sink heavy-lidded, transpires behind closed peepers ... angels, they don't have much in the way of a will. To will is to disagree; not to submit; to dissent.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Satanic Verses

“When you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Satanic Verses

“Everest silences you...when you come down, nothing seems worth saying, nothing at all. You find the nothingness wrapping you up, like a sound. Non-being. You can't keep it up, of course. the world rushes in soon enough. What shuts you up is, I think, the sight you've had of perfection: why speak if you can't manage perfect thoughts, perfect sentences? It feels like a betrayal of what you've been through. But it fades; you accept that certain compromises, closures, are required if you're to continue.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Satanic Verses

“An iceberg is water striving to be land; a mountain, especially a Himalaya, especially Everest, is land's attempt to metamorphose into sky; it is grounded in flight, the earth mutated--nearly--into air, and become, in the true sense, exalted. Long before she ever encountered the mountain, Allie was aware of its brooding presence in her soul.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Satanic Verses

“To be born again,' sang Gibreal Farishta tumbling from the heaveans, 'first you have to die. Ho ji! Ho ji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly Tat-taa! Takatun! How to ever smile again, if first you won't cry? How to win the darling's love mister, without a sigh?”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Satanic Verses

“Exile is a dream of a glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air. ”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Satanic Verses

“Nobody can judge an internal injury by the size of the superficial wound.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Satanic Verses

“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. ”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Satanic Verses

“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.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Satanic Verses

“Can one drown in one's element... If fish can drown in water, can human beings suffocate in air?”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Satanic Verses

“The fact of being alive compensated for what life did to one.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Satanic Verses

“She's no flibberti-gibberti mamzell, but a whir-stir-get-lost-sir bundla dynamite!”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Satanic Verses

“He told her: he fell from the sky and lived. She took a deep breath and believed him, because of her father's faith in the myriad and contradictory possibilities of life, and because, too, of what the mountain had taught her. "Okay," she said, exhaling. "I'll buy it. Just don't tell my mother, all right?" The universe was a place of wonders, and only habituation, the anaesthesia of the everyday, dulled our sight. She had read, a couple of days back, that as part of their natural processes of combustion, the stars in the skies crushed carbon into diamonds. The idea of the stars raining diamonds into the void: that sounded like a miracle, too. If that could happen, so could this. Babies fell out of zillionth-floor windows and bounced. There was a scene about that in François Truffaut's movie L'Argent du Poche...She focused her thoughts. "Sometimes," she decided to say, "wonderful things happen to me, too.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Satanic Verses

“A book is a product of a pact with the Devil that inverts the Faustian contract, he'd told Allie. Dr Faustus sacrificed eternity in return for two dozen years of power; the writer agrees to the ruination of his life, and gains (but only if he's lucky) maybe not eternity, but posterity, at least. Either way (this was Jumpy's point) it's the Devil who wins.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Satanic Verses

“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 him. "A stupid. Change back! Damn fool! Of course you can." She was a vortex, a siren, tempting him back to his old self. But it was a dead self, a shadow, a ghost and he would not become a phantom. There was a return ticket to London in his wallet, and he was going to use it.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Satanic Verses

“Captain Ahab drowned, he reminded himself; it was the trimmer, Ishmael, who survived.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Satanic Verses

“Nobody can judge an internal injury," he had said, "by the size of the superficial wound, of the hole.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Satanic Verses

“Maybe unhappiness is the continuum through which a human life moves, and joy just a series of blips, of islands in the stream.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Satanic Verses

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Popular quotes

“I don't know what justice is," she said.

"That's because it isn't the sort of thing you discover. It's a thing you make." She looked at him, and he shrugged. "There are things you find out in the world. Rocks and streams and trees. And there are things you make. Like a house, or a song. It's not that houses and songs aren't real, but you don't just find them in a field someplace and haul them back home with you. They have to be worked at. Made.”
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“Oh, what's the use of your fairmindedness if you never decide for yourself? Anyone gets hold of you and makes you do what they want. And you see through them and laugh at them - and do it. It's not enough to see clearly; I'm muddle-headed and stupid, and not worth a quarter of you, but I have tried to do what seemed right at the time. And you - your brain and your insight are splendid. But when you see what's right you're too idle to do it. You told me once that we shall be judged by our intentions, not by our accomplishments. I thought it a grand remark. But we must intend to accomplish - not sit intending on a chair.”
― E.M. Forster, quote from Where Angels Fear to Tread

“Each second is rather torturous, as though it will never move on, and as though it will never get any easier, and yet when I look back on it, look where we are. Two weeks on. And I’m doing it. And I still believe I simply cannot.”
― Cecelia Ahern, quote from One Hundred Names

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