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Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie Books

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Quichotte

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In good faith

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Shame

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Grimus

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Joseph Anton

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East, West

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Victory City

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Home

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“Much changes in eighteen months on earth, in the age of acceleration that began around the turn of the millennium and still continues to this day. All our stories are told more quickly now, we are addicted to the acceleration, we have forgotten the pleasures of the old slownesses, of the dawdles, the browses, the three-volume novels, the four-hour motion pictures, the thirteen-episode drama series, the pleasures of duration, of lingering. Do what you have to do, tell your story, live your life, get out quickly, spit spot.”

LifeStoriesPleasureDurationLingeringSlownessQuicknessAccelerationBrowsingDawdling
Book:Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights
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“He did not wish to be divine. If there had never been a God, the emperor thought, it might have been easier to work out what goodness was. This business of worship, of the abnegation of self in the face of the Almighty, was a distraction, a false trail. 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.”

PhilosophyReligionSalman Rushdie
Book:The Enchantress of Florence
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“I no longer want to be anything except what who I am. 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 who's being-in-the-world affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each "I", every one 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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Book:Midnight’s Children
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“In my unhappiness I persuaded myself that my father's disdain for his daughter was the natural state of affairs, the healthy state, and my female nature was the plague. But here we are at the truth, and it is he who is sick and I am who am well. What is the poison in his body? Maybe it's himself.”

WomenMisogynyFathersDisdainFemalesFathers And DaughtersBeing Female
Book:Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights
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“What the Swots had studied deeply was the art of forbidding things, and in a very short time they had forbidden painting, sculpture, music, theatre, film, journalism, hashish, voting, elections, individualism, disagreement, pleasure, happiness, pool tables, clean-shaven chins (on men), women’s faces, women’s bodies, women’s education, women’s sports, women’s rights. They would have liked to have forbidden women altogether but even they could see that that was not entirely feasible, so they contented themselves with making women’s lives as unpleasant as possible.”

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Book:Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights
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“He needed her so badly, to reassure himself of his own existence, that he never comprehended the desperation in her dazzling, permanent smile, the terror in the brightness with which she faced the world, or the reasons why she hid when she couldn't manage to beam... every moment she spent in the world was full of panic, so she smiled and smiled and maybe once a week she locked the door and shook and felt like a husk, like an empty peanut-shell, a monkey without a nut.”

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Book:The Satanic Verses
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“Once," he said, "people believed that they lived in little boxes, boxes that contained their whole stories, and that there was no need to worry much about what other people were doing in their other little boxes, whether nearby or far away. Other people's stories had nothing to do with ours. But then the world got smaller and all the boxes got pushed up against all the other boxes and opened up, and now that all the boxes are connected to all the other boxes, we have to understand what's going on in all the boxes we aren't in, otherwise we don't know why the things happening in our boxes are happening. Everything is connected.”

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Book:Quichotte
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“It was as if he took the complexity of human beings as a personal affront, the maddening inconsistency of human beings, their contradictions which they made no attempt to wipe out or reconcile, their mixture of idealism and concupiscence, grandeur and pettiness, truth and lies. They were not to be taken seriously any more than a cockroach deserves serious consideration.”

PeopleHumansHumanityHuman BeingsComplexityInconsistencyContradictions
Book:Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights
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“Human sanity was a poor, fragile thing at best, she thought. Hatred stupidity devotion greed the four horsemen of the new apocalypse. Yet she loved these wrecked people and wanted to save them from the dark jinn who fed, watered and made manifest the darkness within themselves. To love one human being was to begin to love them all. To love two was to be hooked forever, helpless in the grip of love.”

PeopleLoveHumansHuman BeingsAffectionSanityFragility
Book:Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights
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“Normal is guns and the normal America that really wants to be great again. Then there's another normal if your skin color is the wrong color and another if you're educated and another if you think education is brainwashing and there's an America that believes in vaccines for kids and another that says that's a con trick and everything one normal believes is a lie to another normal and they're all on TV depending where you look, so, yeah, it's confusing. I'm really trying to understand which this is America now. Zap zap zap.”

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Book:Quichotte
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“Fear was a man running from his shadow. It was a woman wearing headphones and the only sound she could hear in them was her own terror. Fear was a solipsist, a narcissist, blind to everything except itself. Fear was stronger than ethics, stronger than judgment, stronger than responsibility, stronger than civilization. Fear was a bolting animal trampling children underfoot as it fled from itself. Fear was a bigot, a tyrant, a coward, a red mist, a whore. Fear was a bullet pointed at his heart.”

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Book:Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights
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“The most important of these things is that art challenges orthodoxy. To reject or vilify art because it does that is to fail to understand its nature. Art sets the artist’s passionate personal vision against the received ideas of its time. Art knows that received ideas are the enemies of art, as Flaubert told us in Bouvard and Pécuchet. Clichés are received ideas and so are ideologies, both those which depend on the sanction of invisible sky gods and those which do not. Without art, our ability to think, to see freshly, and to renew our world would wither and die.Art is not a luxury. It stands at the essence of our humanity, and it asks for no special protection except the right to exist.It accepts argument, criticism, even rejection. It does not accept violence.And in the end, it outlasts those who oppress it. The poet Ovid was exiled by Augustus Caesar, but the poetry of Ovid has outlasted the Roman Empire. The poet Mandelstam’s life was ruined by Joseph Stalin, but his poetry has outlasted the Soviet Union. The poet Lorca was murdered by the thugs of General Franco, but his art has outlasted the fascism of the Falange.”

Art
Book:Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder
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“Originality is dangerous. It challenges, questions, overturns assumptions, unsettles moral codes, disrespects sacred cows or other such entities. It can be shocking, or ugly, or, to use the catch-all term so beloved of the tabloid press, controversial. And if we believe in liberty, if we want the air we breathe to remain plentiful and breathable, this is the art whose right to exist we must not only defend but celebrate. Art is not entertainment. At its very best, it's a revolution”

WritingArt
Book:Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020
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“When we confront a work of art we listen for the artist's voice. The greater the artist, the stronger and more distinct is the voice we hear. Only Mozart sounds like Mozart, only Hemingway sounds like Hemingway. This is one of the chief satisfactions of the artistic experience: to hear a voice speaking as only that voice can speak. And when the voice is exceptionally strong, it can exalt its material and allow us to experience the rarest of joys: that of transcendence.”

ArtArtistWritersMusicians
Book:Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020
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“I am comparing gravity with belonging... Both phenomena observably exist... but neither is understood...We know the force of gravity but not its origins; and to explain how we become attached to our birth places we pretend that we are trees and speak of roots. Look under your feet. You will not find gnarled growths sprouting through the soles. Roots, I sometimes think, are a conservative myth, designed to keep us in our places. -- from "Home" and "Shame”

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Book:Home
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“And by this time the Chinese box was peeling crazily, and as each layer fell away a new voice told a new tale, none of the tales finished because the box inevitably found a new story inside each unfinished one, until it seemed that digression was the true principle of the universe, that the only real subject was the way the subject kept changing, and how could anyone live in a crazy situation in which nothing remained the same for five minutes and no narrative was ever driven through to its conclusion, there could be no meaning in such an environment, only absurdity, the unmeaningness that was the only sort of meaning anyone could hold on to.”

StoriesChangeMeaningUnfinishedNarrativesDigressionsUnfinished StoriesUnmeaningness
Book:Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights
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“Children get food shelter pocket money longholidays and love, all of it apparently free gratis, and most of the little fools think it's a sort of compensation for having been born. 'There are no strings on me!' They sang; but I, pinnoccio, saw the strings. Parents are impelled by the profit motive - nothing more, nothing less. For their attentions, they expected, from me, the immense dividend of greatness.”

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Book:Midnight’s Children
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“How treacherous history is! Half-truths, ignorance, deceptions, false trails, errors, and lies, and buried somewhere in between all of that, the truth, in which it is easy to lose faith, of which it is consequently easy to say, it’s a chimera, there’s no such thing, everything is relative, one man’s absolute belief is another man’s fairy tale; but about which we insist, we insist most emphatically, that it is too important an idea to give up to the relativity merchants.”

TruthHistoryRelativityHalf Truths
Book:Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights
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“On winter nights he, who had never slept beneath more than a sheet, lay beneath mountains of wool and felt like a figure in an ancient myth, condemned by the gods to have a boulder pressing down upon his chest; but never mind, he would be English, even if his classmates giggled at his voice and excluded him from their secrets, because these exclusions only increased his determination, and that was when he began to act, to find masks that these fellows would recognize, paleface masks, clown-masks, until he fooled them into thinking he was okay, he was people-like-us.”

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Book:The Satanic Verses
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“Alone, [Chamcha] all at once remembered that he and Pamela had once disagreed, as they disagreed on everything, on a short-story they’d both read, whose theme was precisely the nature of the unforgivable. Title and author eluded him, but the story came back vividly. A man and a woman had been intimate friends (never lovers) for all their adult lives. On his twenty-first birthday (they were both poor at the time) she had given him, as a joke, the most horrible, cheap glass vase she could find, in colours a garish parody of Venetian gaiety. Twenty years later, when they were both successful and greying, she visited his home and quarrelled with him over his treatment of a mutual friend. In the course of the quarrel her eye fell upon the old vase, which he still kept in pride of place on his sitting-room mantelpiece, and, without pausing in her tirade, she swept it to the floor, crushing it beyond hope of repair. He never spoke to her again; when she died, half a century later, he refused to visit her deathbed or attend her funeral, even though messengers were sent to tell him that these were her dearest wishes. ‘Tell her,’ he said to the emissaries, 'that she never knew how much I valued what she broke.’ The emissaries argued, pleaded, raged. If she had not known how much meaning he had invested in the trifle, how could she in all fairness be blamed? And had she not made countless attempts, over the years, to apologize and atone? And she was dying, for heaven’s sake; could not this ancient, childish rift be healed at last? They had lost a lifetime’s friendship; could they not even say goodbye? 'No,’ said the unforgiving man. – 'Really because of the vase? Or are you concealing some other, darker matter?’ – 'It was the vase,’ he answered, 'the vase, and nothing but.’ Pamela thought the man petty and cruel, but Chamcha had even then appreciated the curious privacy, the inexplicable inwardness of the issue. 'Nobody can judge an internal injury,’ he had said, 'by the size of the superficial wound, of the hole.”

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Author:Salman Rushdie
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