Hey you, long face,' shouted an elderly gent who must have been at least seventy years old, but who was dancing through the flooded, rainy streets, w… - Salman Rushdie

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.

"Khattam-Shud,' he said slowly, 'is the Arch-Enemy of all Stories, even of language itself. He is the Prince of Silence and the Foe of Speech. And because everything ends, because dreams end, stories end, life ends, at the finish of everything we use his name. "It's finished," we tell one another, "it's over. Khattam-Shud: The End.

"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."