أننى أعيش فى بلاد, الحقيقه فيها هى ما تجئ به التعليمات لكف الحقيقه عن الوجود فعلا, بحيث يغدو محتملاً أن يكون كل شئ هو الحقيقه باستثناء ما يقال لنا إنه… - Salman Rushdie

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.

The old man has always believed in the mutability of things; has known that no matter how solid the ground beneath your feet may seem, it can, at any moment, turn into quicksand and suck you down. Always be prepared.

All games have morals; and the game of Snakes and Ladders captures, as no other activity can hope to do, the eternal truth that for every ladder you climb, a snake is waiting just around the corner; and for every snake, a ladder will compensate. But it's more than that; no mere carrot-and-stick affair; because implicit in the game is the unchanging twoness of things, the duality of up against down, good against evil; the solid rationality of ladders balances the occult sinuosities of the serpent; in the opposition of staircase and cobra we can see, metaphorically, all conceivable oppositions, Alpha against Omega, father against mother; here is the war of Mary and Musa, and the polarities of knees and nose ... but I found, very early in my life, that the game lacked one crucial dimension, that of ambiguity - because, as events are about to show, it is also possible to slither down a ladder and climb to triumph on the venom of a snake ...