“A sigh isn't just a sigh. We inhale the world and breathe out meaning. While we can. While we can.”
Source: The Moor's Last Sigh
Salman Rushdie: Quotes about the world
Salman Rushdie is British Indian novelist and essayist. Explore interesting quotes on world.
Salman Rushdie:
244
quotes
14
likes
Address at Columbia University (1991)
Context: For many people, I've ceased to be a human being. I've become an issue, a bother, an "affair." … And has it really been so long since religions persecuted people, burning them as heretics, drowning them as witches, that you can't recognize religious persecution when you see it? … What is my single life worth? Despair whispers in my ear: "Not a lot." But I refuse to give in to despair … because … I know that many people do care, and are appalled by the … upside-down logic of the post-fatwa world, in which a … novelist can be accused of having savaged or "mugged" a whole community, becoming its tormentor (instead of its … victim) and the scapegoat for … its discontents…. (What minority is smaller and weaker than a minority of one?)
Address at Columbia University (1991)
Context: "Our lives teach us who we are." I have learned the hard way that when you permit anyone else's description of reality to supplant your own — and such descriptions have been raining down on me, from security advisers, governments, journalists, Archbishops, friends, enemies, mullahs — then you might as well be dead. Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always carried about is rather more vulnerable. Yet I must cling with all my might to … my own soul; must hold on to its mischievous, iconoclastic, out-of-step clown-instincts, no matter how great the storm. And if that plunges me into contradiction and paradox, so be it; I've lived in that messy ocean all my life. I've fished in it for my art. This turbulent sea was the sea outside my bedroom window in Bombay. It is the sea by which I was born, and which I carry within me wherever I go.
"Free speech is a non-starter," says one of my Islamic extremist opponents. No, sir, it is not. Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.
“I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world.”
Midnight's Children (1981)
Context: 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.
“The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.”
Source: The Satanic Verses (1988)
“To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.”
Variant: To understand just one life you have to swallow the world... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?
Source: Midnight's Children
“Not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite; our hopes spill over its rim.”
Source: The Satanic Verses
“I learned: the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time.”
Source: Midnight's Children
Source: Haroun and the Sea of Stories
Salman Rushdie — Talking with David Frost (1993)
“It is a funny view of the world that a book can cause riots.”
(When asked if he apprehended riots) Interview with Shrabani Basu (September 1988), quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2001). Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism. New Delhi: Rupa. p. 32
The Hindu interview (2012)
Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992–2002
The Hindu interview (2012)