Salman Rushdie: Trending quotes

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Salman Rushdie: 244 quotes14 likes

“Nothing comes from nothing, Thieflet; no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old--it is the new combinations that make them new.”

Salman Rushdie Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Source: Haroun and the Sea of Stories

“He knew what he knew: that the real world was full of magic, so magical worlds could easily be real.”

Salman Rushdie Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Source: Haroun and the Sea of Stories

“I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.”

Salman Rushdie book Midnight's Children

Source: Midnight's Children

“perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque.”

Salman Rushdie book Midnight's Children

Source: Midnight's Children

“What you were is forever who you are.”

Salman Rushdie book Midnight's Children

Source: Midnight's Children

“It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.”

Salman Rushdie

"Imaginary Homelands (1992)
Source: Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991
Context: It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity. Which seems to be self-evidently true; but I suggest that the writer who is out-of-country and even out-of-language may experience this loss in an intensified form. It is made more concrete for him by the physical fact of discontinuity, of his present being in a different place from his past, of his being "elsewhere"… human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capably only of fractured perceptions. Partial beings, in all the senses of that phrase. Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because of our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to the death.

“The lessons one learns at school are not always the ones the school thinks it's teaching.”

Salman Rushdie book Joseph Anton: A Memoir

Source: Joseph Anton: A Memoir

“Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained.”

Salman Rushdie

“India, the new myth--a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God.”

Salman Rushdie book Midnight's Children

Source: Midnight's Children

“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.”

Salman Rushdie Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Source: Haroun and the Sea of Stories

“Ignorantly is how we all fall in love; for it is a kind of fall. Closing our eyes, we leap from that cliff in hope of a soft landing. Nor is it always soft; but still, without that leap nobody comes to life.”

Salman Rushdie book The Moor's Last Sigh

Source: The Moor's Last Sigh

“optimism is a disease”

Salman Rushdie book Midnight's Children

Source: Midnight's Children

“… because silence, too, has an echo, hollower and longer-lasting than the reverberations of any sound.”

Salman Rushdie book Midnight's Children

Source: Midnight's Children

“Only the foolish, blinded by language's conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at it's melancholy rim, green in it's envious heart. It may burn white, or even, in it's greatest rages, black.”

Salman Rushdie

“Exile is a dream of a glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air.”

Salman Rushdie book The Satanic Verses

Source: The Satanic Verses