“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
Salman Rushdie
Born place: in Bombay, India
Born date June 19, 1947
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“Moral for psychologists. -- Not to go in for backstairs psychology. Never to observe in order to observe! That gives a false perspective, leads to squinting and something forced and exaggerated. Experience as the wish to experience does not succeed. One must not eye oneself while having an experience; else the eye becomes "an evil eye." A born psychologist guards instinctively against seeing in order to see; the same is true of the born painter. He never works "from nature"; he leaves it to his instinct, to his camera obscura, to sift through and express the "case," "nature," that which is "experienced." He is conscious only of what is general, of the conclusion, the result: he does not know arbitrary abstractions from an individual case.
What happens when one proceeds differently? For example, if, in the manner of the Parisian novelists, one goes in for backstairs psychology and deals in gossip, wholesale and retail? Then one lies in wait for reality, as it were, and every evening one brings home a handful of curiosities. But note what finally comes of all this: a heap of splotches, a mosaic at best, but in any case something added together, something restless, a mess of screaming colors. The worst in this respect is accomplished by the Goncourts; they do not put three sentences together without really hurting the eye, the psychologist's eye. Nature, estimated artistically, is no model. It exaggerates, it distorts, it leaves gaps. Nature is chance. To study "from nature" seems to me to be a bad sign: it betrays submission, weakness, fatalism; this lying in the dust before petit faits [little facts] is unworthy of a whole artist. To see what is--that is the mark of another kind of spirit, the anti-artistic, the factual. One must know who one is.
Toward a psychology of the artist. -- If there is to be art, if there is to be any aesthetic doing and seeing, one physiological condition is indispensable: frenzy. Frenzy must first have enhanced the excitability of the whole machine; else there is no art. All kinds of frenzy, however diversely conditioned, have the strength to accomplish this: above all, the frenzy of sexual excitement, this most ancient and original form of frenzy. Also the frenzy that follows all great cravings, all strong affects; the frenzy of feasts, contests, feats of daring, victory, all extreme movement; the frenzy of cruelty; the frenzy in destruction, the frenzy under certain meteorological influences, as for example the frenzy of spring; or under the influence of narcotics; and finally the frenzy of will, the frenzy of an overcharged and swollen will. What is essential in such frenzy is the feeling of increased strength and fullness. Out of this feeling one lends to things, one forces them to accept from us, one violates them--this process is called idealizing. Let us get rid of a prejudice here: idealizing does not consist, as is commonly held, in subtracting or discounting the petty and inconsequential. What is decisive is rather a tremendous drive to bring out the main features so that the others disappear in the process.
In this state one enriches everything out of one's own fullness: whatever one sees, whatever one wills, is seen swelled, taut, strong, overloaded with strength. A man in this state transforms things until they mirror his power--until they are reflections of his perfection. This having to transform into perfection is--art. Even everything that he is not yet, becomes for him an occasion of joy in himself; in art man enjoys himself as perfection.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ
“It was love without reason, love for something futureless, love that appeared to exist only to be itself, imperious and all demanding, the kind that would cause him to make a fool of himself in an instant.”
― Flannery O'Connor, quote from The Violent Bear It Away
“And as for you, Gaelen is your uncle, your mother's beloved brother. He's your family. Learn to get along with him. You don't have to like him, but you might want to consider the fact that he's walked the earth more than twice as long as either of your parents, and he's spent the last thousand years battling the enemies of the Fey. He's probably forgotten more Fey skills than you've ever learned.”
― C.L. Wilson, quote from Lady of Light and Shadows
“That an old Charonte custom that go back forever 'casue we a really old race of demons who go back even before forever." She looked over to where Danger's shade glittered in the opposite corner while the former Dark-Huntress was assisting Pam and Kim with the birth, and explained the custom to her.
"When a new baby is born you kill off an old annoying family member who gets on everyone's nerves which for all of us would be the heifer-goddess 'cause the only person who like her be you Akra-Kat. I know she you mother and all, but sometimes you just gotta say no thank you. You a mean old heifer-goddess who need to go play in traffic and get run over by something big like a steamroller or bus or something else really painful that would hurt her a lot and make the rest of us laugh"
"Not to mention the Simi barbecue would have been fun too if someone, Akra-Kat, hadn't stopped the Simi from it. I personally think it would have been a most magnificent gift for the baby. Barbecued heifer-goddess Artemis. Yum! No better meal. Oh then again baby got a delicate constitution and that might give the poor thing indigestion. Artemis definitely give the Simi indigestion and I ain't even ate her yet.”
― Sherrilyn Kenyon, quote from Retribution
“We were just us, broken and bruised, fucked-up and messy, and together we were everything we never thought we could be.”
― T.M. Frazier, quote from The Dark Light of Day
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