“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

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Salman Rushdie 122
British Indian novelist and essayist 1947

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“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.

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“Have you ever noticed flocks of swallows flying past between the lines of certain books, whole verses of trembling, pointed swallows? One must interpret the flights of those birds…”

Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) Polish novelist and painter

“Spring” http://www.schulzian.net/translation/sanatorium/spring01.htm
His father, Books

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