Salman Rushdie: Trending quotes (page 5)

“People don't like being around despair. Our tolerance for the truly hopeless, for those who are irredeemably broken by life is strictly limited. The sob stories we like are the ones that end before we're bored.”

“Nobody can judge an internal injury by the size of the superficial wound.”

“If I were asked for a one-sentence sound
bite on religion, I would say I was against it.”

“My heart broke open and history fell in.”

“Between shame and shamelessness lies the axis upon which we turn; meteorological conditions at both these poles are of the most extreme, ferocious type. Shamelessness, shame: the roots of violence.”

“What grows best in the heat: fantasy; unreason; lust.”

“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.”

“The inevitable triumph of illusion over reality that was the single most obvious truth about the history of the human race.”

“A man who catches History's eye is thereafter bound to a mistress from whom he will never escape.”

“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.”

“I know that when people pull apart, they usually employ misunderstanding as a weapon, deliberately getting hold of the stick's wrong end, impaling themselves on its point in order to prove the perfidy of the other.”

“A little bit of one story joins onto an idea from another, and hey presto,… not old tales but new ones. Nothing comes from nothing.”

“Sometimes we feel we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools.”

“everything is relative, one man’s absolute belief is another man’s fairy tale;”

“Travel was pointless. It removed you from the place in which you had a meaning, and to which you gave meaning in return by dedicating your life to it, and it spirited you away into fairylands where you were, and looked, frankly absurd.”

“Life is lived forward but is judged in reverse.”

“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.”

“Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in ritual, unthinking obeisance before a deity but rather, perhaps, in the slow clumsy, error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path.”

“This may be the curse of human race. Not that we are different from one anther, but we are so alike.”