“When you know what you're against you have taken the first step to discovering what you're for.”
Source: The Ground Beneath Her Feet
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Salman Rushdie 122
British Indian novelist and essayist 1947Related quotes
Source: Success! (1977), p. 240
Context: The first step to success is to accept the consequences of knowing that you're right, when that is the case. It is not so much a matter of being assertive, as of giving up the comfortable cocoon of apologies and guilt in which most of us have chosen to live.

“You have to salvage what you can, even if you're the one who buried it in the first place.”
Source: Pretty Monsters: Stories

Anna Wulf, in "Free Women: 2"<!-- 255 -->
Source: The Golden Notebook (1962)
Context: It seems to me like this. It's not a terrible thing — I mean, it may be terrible, but it's not damaging, it's not poisoning, to do without something one really wants. It's not bad to say: My work is not what I really want, I'm capable of doing something bigger. Or I'm a person who needs love, and I'm doing without it. What's terrible is to pretend that the second-rate is the first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.
TED: "How to run a company with (almost) no rules" https://www.ted.com/talks/ricardo_semler_how_to_run_a_company_with_almost_no_rules/ (October 2014)

Endless Love (1981).
Song lyrics