Salman Rushdie
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
whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that
happens after I'm gone which would not have happened if I had not come.
Midnight's Children
Memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own.
Midnight's Children
Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it invariably seems more and more incredible. suppose yourself in a large cinema, sitting at first in the back row and gradually moving up, row by row, until your nose is almost pressed against the screen. gradually the stars faces dissolve into dancing grain; tiny details assume grotesque proportions; the illusion dissolves - or rather, it becomes clear that the illusion itself is reality
Midnight's Children
Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence: but I seem to have found from somewhere the trick of filling in the gaps in my knowledge, so that everything is in my head, down to the last detail, such as the way the mist seemed to slant across the early morning air everything, and not just the few clues on stumbles across, for instance by opening an old tin trunk which should have remained cobwebby and closed.
Midnight's Children
"Memorys truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent versions of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone elses version more than his own."
Midnight's Children
The human condition, but what of the angelic? Halfway
between Allahgod and homosap, did they ever doubt? They did: challenging God's
will one day they hid muttering beneath the Throne, daring to ask forbidden
things: antiquestions. Is it right that. Could it not be argued. Freedom, the
old antiquest. He calmed them down, naturally, employing management skills a la
god. Flattered them: you will be the instruments of my will on earth, the
salvationdamnation of man, all the usual etcetera. And hey presto, the end of
protest, on with the haloes, back to work. Angels are easily pacified; turn
them into instruments and they'll play your harpy tune. Human beings are
tougher nuts, can doubt anything, even the evidence of their own eyes. Of
behing-their-own-eyes. Of what, as they sink heavy-lidded, transpires behind
closed peepers ... angels, they don't have much in the way of a will. To will
is to disagree; not to submit; to dissent.
The Satanic Verses
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.
The Satanic Verses
