Salman Rushdie - Midnight's Children (1981)

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Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence.

Salman Rushdie
As I look back, I feel a touch of pride at my younger self's dedication to literature, which gave him the strength of mind to resist the blandishments of the enemies of promise. The sirens of ad-land sang sweetly and seductively, but I thought of Odysseus lashing himself to the mast of his ship, and somehow stayed on course.

Salman Rushdie
Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems – but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.

Salman Rushdie
There is no magic on earth strong enough to wipe out the legacies of one's parents.

Salman Rushdie
Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each "I", everyone of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world.

Salman Rushdie
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...

Salman Rushdie
Everything has shape, if you look for it. There is no escape from form.

Salman Rushdie
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.

Salman Rushdie
Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison.

Salman Rushdie
When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.

Salman Rushdie
Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.

Salman Rushdie
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.

Salman Rushdie
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.

Salman Rushdie
I learned: the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time.

Salman Rushdie
To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.

Salman Rushdie
Every pickle-jar…contains, therefore, the most exalted of possibilities: the feasibility of the chutnification of history.

Salman Rushdie
Perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque.

Salman Rushdie
I fell victim to the temptation of every autobiographer, to the illusion that since the past exists only in one's memories and the words which strive vainly to encapsulate them, it is possible to create past events simply by saying they occurred.

Salman Rushdie