Salman Rushdie - The Satanic Verses (1988)

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Such is the miraculous nature of the future of exiles: what is first uttered in the impotence of an overheated apartment becomes the fate of nations.

Salman Rushdie
He would dream of discovering a magic optometrist from whom he would purchase a pair of green-tinged spectacles which would correct his regrettable myopia, and after that he would be able to see through the dense, blinding air to the fabulous world beneath.

Salman Rushdie
A book is a product of a pact with the Devil that inverts the Faustian contract, he'd told Allie. Dr Faustus sacrificed eternity in return for two dozen years of power; the writer agrees to the ruination of his life, and gains (but only if he's lucky) maybe not eternity, but posterity, at least. Either way (this was Jumpy's point) it's the Devil who wins.

Salman Rushdie
How does newness come into the world? How is it born? Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made? How does it survive, extreme and dangerous as it is? What compromises, what deals, what betrayals of its secret nature must it make to stave off the wrecking crew, the exterminating angel, the guillotine? Is birth always a fall? Do angels have wings? Can men fly?

Salman Rushdie
The fact of being alive compensated for what life did to one.

Salman Rushdie
When you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible.

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.

Salman Rushdie
Can one drown in one's element... If fish can drown in water, can human beings suffocate in air?

Salman Rushdie
The history of life was not the bumbling progress — the very English, middle-class progress — Victorian thought had wanted it to be, but violent, a thing of dramatic, cumulative transformations: in the old formulation, more revolution than evolution.

Salman Rushdie
Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit.

Salman Rushdie
Not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite; our hopes spill over its rim.

Salman Rushdie
I hate admitting that my enemies have a point.

Salman Rushdie
The act of migration puts into crisis everything about the migrating individual or group, everything about identity and self-hood and culture and belief. So if this is a novel about migration it must be that act of putting in question. It must perform the crisis it describes.

Salman Rushdie
From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.

Salman Rushdie
Question: What is the opposite of faith? Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself a kind of belief. Doubt.

Salman Rushdie
Captain Ahab drowned, he reminded himself; it was the trimmer, Ishmael, who survived.

Salman Rushdie
Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.

Salman Rushdie
Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.

Salman Rushdie
The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.

Salman Rushdie
Your blasphemy, Salman, can't be forgiven... To set your words against the Words of God.

Salman Rushdie
An iceberg is water striving to be land; a mountain, especially a Himalaya, especially Everest, is land's attempt to metamorphose into sky; it is grounded in flight, the earth mutated—nearly—into air, and become, in the true sense, exalted. Long before she ever encountered the mountain, Allie was aware of its brooding presence in her soul.

Salman Rushdie
Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

Salman Rushdie
Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet...Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.

Salman Rushdie
A people that has remained convinced of its greatness and invulnerability, that has chosen to believe such a myth in the face of all the evidence, is a people in the grip of a kind of sleep, or madness.

Salman Rushdie
A man who invents himself needs someone to believe in him... Not only the need to be believed in, but the need to believe in another. You've got it: Love.

Salman Rushdie
She's no flibberti-gibberti mamzell, but a whir-stir-get-lost-sir bundla dynamite!

Salman Rushdie
Why speak if you can't manage perfect thoughts, perfect sentences?

Salman Rushdie
Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.

Salman Rushdie
A poet's work... to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.

Salman Rushdie