Quotes from Salman Rushdie

History is unkind to those it abandons, and can be equally unkind to those who make it.

A maior parte das coisas que importam na nossa vida acontece na nossa ausência.

From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable. He moves in mysterious ways: men say. Small wonder, then, that women have turned to me.

What shuts you up is, I think, the sight you've had of perfection: why speak if you can't manage perfect thoughts, perfect sentences? It feels like a betrayal of what you've been through. But it fades; you accept that certain compromises, closures, are required if you're to continue.

Witchcraft requires no potions, familiar spirits, or magic wands. Language upon a silvered tongue affords enchantment enough.

An old, secret pain welled up in him, begging for healing.

Guns were alive in America, and death was their random gift.

Su vida había sido una sucesión de actos de voluntad, pero a veces flaqueaba y se hundía

one man long as a life and thin as a lie, a second who seems to lack a spine, and a third whose lower lip juts, whose belly tends to squashiness, whose hair is thinning and greasy and worming over the tops of his ears, and between whose eyebrows is the tell-tale furrow that will, as he ages, deepen into the scar of a bitter, angry man.

One day, perhaps, the world may taste the pickles of history. They may be too strong for some palates, their smell may be overpowering, tears may rise to eyes; I hope nevertheless that it will be possible to say of them that they possess the authentic taste of truth … that they are, despite everything, acts of love.

America, what happened to your optimism, your new frontiers, your simple Rockwell dreams? I'm plunging into your night, America, pushing myself deep into your heart like a knife, but the blade of my weapon is hope.

Half-Christian, half-Jewish, a 'cathjew nut'

Fictions could be as powerful as histories, revealing the new people to themselves, allowing them to understand their own natures and the natures of those around them, and making them real.

To be born again, first you have to die.

Shah Ismail had fallen victim to the rarely used, great Uzbek anti-Shiite potato and sturgeon curse, which required quantities of potatoes and caviar which were not easy to amass, and a unity of purpose among the Sunni witches which was likewise difficult to achieve.

He returned to Cambridge feeling, at the ripe old age of twenty, that life was passing him by.

On December 15th, 1971, Tiger Niazi surrendered to Sam Manekshaw;

I should never have dreamed of purpose, I am coming to the conclusion that privacy, the small individual lives of men, are preferable to all this inflated macrocosmic activity.

Because he did have that gift, truly he did, he was the Man of a Thousand Voices and a Voice. If you wanted to know how your ketchup bottle should talk in its television commercial, if you were unsure as to the ideal voice for your packet of garlic-flavoured crisps, he was your very man. He made carpets speak in warehouse advertisements, he did celebrity impersonations, baked beans, frozen peas.

It was, for him, an object lesson in the importance of the "better out than in" free speech argument—that it was better to allow even the most reprehensible speech than to sweep it under the carpet, better to publicly contest and perhaps deride what was loathsome than to give it the glamour of taboo, and that, for the most part, people could be trusted to tell the good from the bad.

Youth was often wretched, the struggle to become themselves tore the young to shreds, but sometimes, after the struggle, better days began.

Unwilling wholly to abandon the project for which his wife had died, unable to maintain any longer the absolute belief which the enterprise required, Muhammad Din entered the station wagon of scepticism.

life had once again, perversely, refused to remain life-sized. It had turned melodramatic: and that embarrassed him.

This is how history moves; the obsession of one moment is relegated to the junkyard of oblivion by the next.