Quotes from Salman Rushdie

But what I learned from the Widow's Hand is that whose who would be gods fear no one so much as other potential deities

Ideas were like the tides of the sea or the phases of the moon, they came into being, rose and grew in their proper time, and then ebbed, darkened, and vanished when the great wheel turned.

Vecina y amiga. ¿Qué más tengo que decir? Por supuesto que las maliciosas revistas de escándalo de la ciudad llenaron columnas con insinuaciones y frases de doble sentido, pero ello no nos autoriza a ponernos a su nivel.

Conscience never dies the cricket said There will always be a cricket for those who deserve, who are worthy.

How deeply could she have cared for me if she could dive so swiftly into the next things? How real had it been? Such thoughts plagued me, though I knew, in my deepest heart, that this was me trying to shift the blame, and the blame could not be shifted, it rested firmly on my shoulders.—So this was

reality was not something given, not an absolute, but something that men made up, and that values, too, changed according to who was doing the valuing. A world that did not cohere, in which truth did not exist and was replaced by warring versions trying to dominate or even eradicate their rivals, horrified

Was it possible that his fear of flying had been cured at exactly the moment at which it was perfectly rational to feel afraid?

to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world.

he perceived that this memory-jumbled rag-bag of material was in fact the very heart of her, her self-portrait, the way she looked in the mirror when nobody else was in the room...

In the evenings they sat in pools of yellow light, books on their laps, lost in words. They looked like figures in a Rembrandt painting, Two Philosophers Deep in Meditation, and they were more valuable than any canvas; maybe members of the last generation of their kind, and we, we who are post-, who come after, will regret we did not learn more at their feet.

There are people who need to impose a shape upon the shapelessness of life. For such people the quest narrative is always attractive. It prevents them from suffering the agony of feeling what's the word. Incoherent.

Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence:

These are the times we live in, in which men hide their truths, perhaps even from themselves, and live in lies, until the lies reveal those truths in ways impossible to foretell.

but could a man be simultaneously bad and good, we asked ourselves, and the Afghan Moon replied that irreconcilable contradiction and the union of opposites was the deepest mystery of all.

un país donde la verdad es lo que se le dice que sea, la realidad, de forma absolutamente literal, deja de existir, de forma que todo resulta posible salvo lo que se nos dice que es real;

the age of information, my dear," my mother said with justifiable pride when they had done their work at their computers, "everyone's garbage is on display for all to see, and all you need to know is how to look.

the personification of philistine triumphalism

description of the world contains facts, certainly, and facts, as we've seen, are fluttery, elusive creatures, but there are armies of fact lepidopterists chasing after them, and sometimes they do get nailed to the wall, like moths.

Life had become a series of vanishing photographs, posted every day, gone the next. One had no story anymore. Character, narrative, history, were all dead. Only the flat caricature of the instant remained, and that was what one was judged by.

Without water we are nothing, the traveler thought. Even an emperor, denied water, would swiftly turn to dust. Water is the real monarch and we are all its slaves.

nothing is sacred in and of itself...Ideas, texts, even people can be made sacred... the act of making sacred is in truth an event in history. It is the product of the many and complex pressures of the time in which the act occurs. And events in history must always be subject to questioning, deconstruction, even to declaration of their obsolescence

This thing: information got abolished sometime in the twentieth century, can't say just when; stands to reason, that's part of the information that got abolsh, abolished. Since then we've been living in a fairy-story.

It was the year of the Joker in Gotham and beyond. The Caped Crusader was nowhere to be seen – it was not an age of heroes – but his arch-rival in the purple frock coat and striped pantaloons was ubiquitous, clearly delighted to have the stage to himself and hogging the limelight with evident delight. He had seen off the Suicide Squad, his feeble competition, but he permitted a few of his inferiors to think of themselves as future members of a Joker administration.

Gazing for the first time upon this amphibian terrain, this bog of nightmare, I should have felt excited; but the heat and recent events were weighing me down; my upper lip was still childishly wet with nose-goo, but I felt oppressed by a feeling of having moved directly from an overlong and dribbling childhood into a premature (though still leaky) old age.