Salman Rushdie Quotes

"She dreamed of him, his face, filling the dream. "Things are ending," he told her. "This civilization; things are closing in on it. It has been quite a culture, brilliant and foul, cannibal and Christian, the glory of the world. We should celebrate it while we can; until night falls."
She didn't agree, not even in the dream, but she knew, as she dreamed, that there was no point telling him now."

We know the force of gravity, but not its origins; and to explain why we become attached to our birthplaces we pretend that we are trees and speak of roots. Look under your feet. You will not find gnarled growths sprouting through the soles. Roots, I sometimes think, are a conservative myth, designed to keep us in our places.

Free societies...are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom's existence.

He knew what he knew: that the real world was full of magic, so magical worlds could easily be real.

One either loves, or waits for love, or banishes love for good. That is the full range of possible choices.

...this is our tragedy, she said in his words, our fictions are killing us, but if we didn’t have those fictions, maybe that would kill us too.

There were six hundred thousand Indian troops in Kashmir but the pogrom of the pandits was not prevented, why was that. Three and a half lakhs of human beings arrived in Jammu as displaced persons and for many months the government did not provide shelters or relief or even register their names, why was that.

...proving once again that there was no escape from recurrence.

You can get anywhere in Pakistan if you know people, even into jail.

Zembla, Zenda, Xanadu:
All our dream-worlds may come true.
Fairy lands are fearsome too.
As I wander far from view
Read, and bring me home to you.

"Once," he said, "people believed that they lived in little boxes, boxes that contained their whole stories, and that there was no need to worry much about what other people were doing in their other little boxes, whether nearby or far away. Other people's stories had nothing to do with ours. But then the world got smaller and all the boxes got pushed up against all the other boxes and opened up, and now that all the boxes are connected to all the other boxes, we have to understand what's going on in all the boxes we aren't in, otherwise we don't know why the things happening in our boxes are happening. Everything is connected."

If I were asked for a one-sentence sound
bite on religion, I would say I was against it.

She says, trying uselessly to console me: 'What are you so long for in your face? Everybody forgets some small things, all the time!'

But if small things go, will large things be close behind?

In these our cowardly times, we deny the grandeur of the Universal, and assert and glorify our local Bigotries, and so we cannot agree on much. In these our degenerate times, men bent on nothing but vainglory and personal gain- hollow, bombastic men for whom nothing is off-limits if it advances their petty cause- will claim to be great leaders and benefactors, acting in the common good, and calling all who oppose them liars, envious, little people, stupid people, stiff, and, in a precise reversal of the truth, dishonest and corrupt.

I want more than what I want. (Vina Apsara)