Quotes from book

The Satanic Verses

“Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.”

“When you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible.”

“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.”

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

“So India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in God’s name.

The problem’s name is God.”

“The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.”

“Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.”

“Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.”

“Question: What is the opposite of faith?

Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself is a kind of belief.

Doubt.”

“Not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite; our hopes spill over its rim.”

“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.”

“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.”

“From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.”

“Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit.”