Quote

How to forgive the world for its beauty, which merely disguises its ugliness for its gentleness, which merely cloaks its cruelty for its illusion of continuity, seamlessly, as the night follows the day, so to speak- whereas in reality life is a series of brutal raptures, falling upon your defenseless hands, like the blows of a woodman's axe?

Salman Rushdie

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Salman Rushdie
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: June 19
Actor
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Bombay
Rushdie
Joseph Anton
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie
Like
Beauty
Cruelty
Blows
World
Upon
Forgive
Gentleness
Fall
Falling
Ugliness
Woodman
Speak
Forgiving
Continuity
Raptures
Night
Blow
Disguise
Disguises
Reality
Illusion
Follows
Defenseless
Hands
Merely
Brutal
Cloaks
Life
Series
Whereas
Rapture

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

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Life is lived forward but is judged in reverse.
Salman Rushdie
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They lived in a great city, a metropolis of many narratives that converged briefly and then separated for ever, discovering their different dooms in that crowd of stories through which all of us, following our own destinies, had to push and shove to find our way through, or out.
Salman Rushdie
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My parents gave me the gift of irreligion, of growing up without bothering to ask people what gods they held dear, assuming that in fact, like my parents, they weren't interested in gods, and that this uninterest was 'normal.' You may argue that the gift was a poisoned chalice, but even if so, that's a cup from which I'd happily drink again.
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We have come to think of taking offence as a fundamental right. We value very little more highly than our rage, which gives us, in our opinion, the moral high ground. From there we can shoot down at our enemies and inflict heavy fatalities.
Salman Rushdie
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Human beings do not perceive things whole we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capably only of fractured perceptions. Partial beings, in all the senses of that phrase.
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Not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite our hopes spill over its rim.
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Sometimes when you finish a book, you don't know quite what you've got.
Salman Rushdie
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Out-of-step intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and the deceased Edward Said have often been dismissed as crazy extremists, 'anti-American,' and in Mr. Said's case even, absurdly, as apologists for Palestinian 'terrorism.'
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So when I studied history at Cambridge, I did a special subject in that, exactly that. And then actually that - while I was studying it was where I came across the so-called incident of the satanic verses.
Salman Rushdie
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Two things form the bedrock of any open society - freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don't have those things, you don't have a free country.
Salman Rushdie
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Writers have been in terrible situations and have yet managed to produce extraordinary work.
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One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don't like the glare of negative publicity.
Salman Rushdie
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There is nothing like a War for the reinvention of lives.
Salman Rushdie
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But I - and I just think it's very - one of the problems of defending the extraordinary principle of freedom of speech is that you have to defend freedom of speech for people like that too.
Salman Rushdie
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I had a very difficult relationship with my father, which ended up okay, but there were many difficult years.
Salman Rushdie
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Fundamentalists of all faiths are the fundamental evil of our time.
Salman Rushdie
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An iceberg is water striving to be land a mountain, especially a Himalaya, especially Everest, is land's attempt to metamorphose into sky it is grounded in flight, the earth mutated--nearly--into air, and become, in the true sense, exalted. Long before she ever encountered the mountain, Allie was aware of its brooding presence in her soul.
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No people whose word for 'yesterday' is the same as their word for 'tomorrow' can be said to have a firm grip on the time.
Salman Rushdie
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Bin Laden was born filthy rich and died in a rich man's house, which he had painstakingly built to the highest specifications.
Salman Rushdie
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India is my kid sister.
Salman Rushdie