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Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.
Salman Rushdie
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Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.
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The only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step outside the frame.
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Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.
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Happy endings must come at the end of something,' the Walrus pointed out. 'If they happen in the middle of a story, or an adventure, or the like, all they do is cheer things up for awhile.
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One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions.
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Family history, of course, has its proper dietary laws. One is supposed to swallow and digest only the permitted parts of it, the halal portions of the past, drained of their redness, their blood.
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Captain Ahab drowned, he reminded himself; it was the trimmer, Ishmael, who survived.
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No people whose word for "yesterday" is the same as their word for "tomorrow" can be said to have a firm grip on the time.
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Question: What is the opposite of faith? Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself a kind of belief. Doubt.
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A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
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Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.
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Make as much racket as you like people. Noise is life and an excess of noise is a sign that life is good. There will be time for us all to be quiet when we are safely dead.
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The real wars of religion are the wars religions unleash against ordinary citizens within their 'sphere of influence'.
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Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence.
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One either loves, or waits for love, or banishes love for good. That is the full range of possible choices.
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Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison.
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Too many people had spent too long demonizing or totemizing me to listen seriously to what I had to say. In the West, some "friends" turned against me, calling me by yet another set of insulting names. Now I was spineless, pathetic, debased; I had betrayed myself, my Cause; above all, I had betrayed them.
I also found myself up against the granite, heartless certainties of Actually Existing Islam, by which I mean the political and priestly power structure that presently dominates and stifles Muslim societies. Actually Existing Islam has failed to create a free society anywhere on Earth, and it wasn't about to let me, of all people, argue in favor of one.
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Memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own.
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Live on, survive, for the earth gives forth wonders. It may swallow your heart, but the wonders keep on coming. You stand before them bareheaded, shriven. What is expected of you is attention.
Salman Rushdie
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Everything has shape, if you look for it. There is no escape from form.
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We were language's magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.
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I have never been to Sarajevo, but I feel that I belong to it, in a way... I... can claim to be, in some sense, an exile from Sarajevo, even though it is a city I do not know. There is a Sarajevo of the mind, an imagined Sarajevo whose ruination and torment exiles us all.
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What had been (at the beginning) no bigger than a full stop had expanded into a comma, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter; now it was bursting into more complex developments, becoming, one might say, a book - perhaps an encylopaedia - even a whole language...
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Too many people spouting too many words, and in the end those words will turn to bullets and stones.
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Quote of the day
Now if the harvest is over, And the world cold, Give me the bonus of laughter, As I lose hold.
John Betjeman
Salman Rushdie
Creative Commons
Born:
June 19, 1947
(age 76)
Bio:
Sir Ahmad Salman Rushdie is a British Indian novelist and essayist. His second novel, Midnight's Children, won the Booker Prize in 1981. Much of his fiction is set on the Indian subcontinent.
Known for:
The Satanic Verses (1988)
Midnight's Children (1981)
Joseph Anton: A Memoir (2012)
Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990)
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