Quotes from Salman Rushdie

Trouble in a marriage," he later wrote, "is like monsoon water accumulating on a flat roof. You don't realize it's up there, but it gets heavier and heavier, until one day, with a great crash, the whole roof falls in on your head.

So, now that Quichotte was in full possession of his senses, there were things he needed to say. 'My quest for you', he told Miss Salma R, 'has not been for you alone, but also for my own compromised goodness and virtue. I see it now. By attaining you - the impossible! - I thought it might validate my life. By becoming worthy of you I might feel worthy of being myself'.

it came anticlimactically, without any warning, wearing soft shoes…

In the evenings at the time of the sunset promenade it was possible to see couples of all sorts taking the air and holding hands without embarrassment: men and men, women and women, and yes, men and women too.

An image has a shape and so does sound and so does montage and so does drama. The film sense is that art which ensures that the four shapes are the same.

So it's you again; well, why not? Nothing ever seems to go away.

The past is a broken cardboard suitcase full of photographs of things I no longer wish to see.

I see that under your old-goof act, beneath your sweet nutty disguise, you're maybe someone else entirely, and that part of you is locked away right now. It's like you've caged the beast.

Voller Entsetzen begriffen sie, dass dies der letzte & schlimmste Trick des Dschungels war, dass er sie, indem er ihre Herzenswünsche erfüllte, dazu verleitete, ihre Träume aufzubrauchen, so dass sie, während ihr Traumleben ihnen entschlüpfte, so hohl & durchsichtig wie Glas wurden.

Such were the factors that detached Ormus Cama from the ordinary ties of family life. The ties that strangle us, which we call love. Because of the loosening of these ties he became, with all the attendant pain of such becoming, free.

You're so sexy, René. I'm serious. You're a sexpot." Maybe weddings bring out the romance in us all.

A bordélynegyed szívében pedig ismét felbukkantak a táncoló medvék és a törpe zsonglÅ'rök, az egyenruhába öltöztetett majmok, akiket arra idomítottak, hogy meghaljanak a hazáért.

just as we cannot write the stories of our own deaths, which is our tragedy, to be stories whose endings can never be known, not even to ourselves, because we are no longer there to know them.

Most of the time she preferred to be sardonically out of line, out of step. To sound harsher than she was. Which fooled nobody, strangely enough. People saw through her tough-guy routine, even liked her for it, and the cruder her formulations, the harder she tried to be this radical alienated individual, the more profoundly she was loved.

One's goal is the shedding of mental obstacles that prevent one from being flooded with the glorious universal, Love as Being. It is a goal, therefore, that requires of us the absolute and irreversible abandonment of reason, for love is without reason, above it and beyond it; it comes without a rational explanation and lives on when there is no reason for it to survive.

and the incident of the Satanic verses in the early career of the Prophet, and the politics of Muhammad's harem after his return to Mecca in triumph; and the surrealism of the newspapers, in which butterflies could fly into young girls' mouths, asking to be consumed, and children were born with no faces

But love is what we want, not freedom. Who then is the unluckier man? The beloved, who is given his heart's desire and must for ever after fear its loss, or the free man, with his unlooked-for liberty, naked and alone between the captive armies of the earth?

The idea that any kind of free society can be constructed in which people will never be offended or insulted, or in which they have the right to call on the law to defend them against being offended or insulted, is absurd.

they have nowhere else to go, and nobody else to be

It is a rare thing to be granted your heart's desire.

This was my mother's chosen disciplinary method: unable to strike us, she ordered us to seal our lips. Some echo, no doubt, of the great silence with which her own mother had tormented Aadam Aziz lingered in her ears—because silence, too, has an echo, hollower and longer-lasting than the reverberations of any sound—and with an emphatic "Chup!" she would place a finger across her lips and command our tongues to be still.

Trouble in a marriage is like monsoon water accumulating on a flat roof. You don't realize it's up there, but it gets heavier and heavier, until one day, with a great crash, the whole roof falls in on your head.

Every quest," Quichotte answered, "takes place both in the sphere of the actual, which is what maps reveal to us, and in the sphere of the symbolic, for which the only maps are the unseen ones in our heads. Still, the actual is also the road to the Grail. We may be after a celestial goal, but we still have to travel along the interstate.

The moment you say an idea system is sacred, whether it's a religious belief system or a secular ideology, the moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.