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The Moor's Last Sigh QUOTES

The Moor's Last Sigh QUOTES

1 " Do jungle animals understand the true nature of the trees among which they have their daily being? In the parent-forest, amid those mighty trunks, we shelter and play; but whether the trees are healthy or corroded, whether they harbour demons or good spirites, we cannot say. Nor do we know the greatest secret of all: that one day we, too, will become as arboreal as they. And the trees, whose leaves we eat, whose bark we gnaw, remember sadly that they were animals once, they climbed like squirrels and bounded like deer, until one day they paused, and their legs grew down into the earth and stuck there, spreading, and vegetation sprouted from their swaying heads. They remember this as a fact; but the lived reality of their fauna years, the how-it-felt of that chaotic freedom is beyond recapture. They remember it as a rustle in their leaves. "

― Salman Rushdie , The Moor's Last Sigh

2 " A sigh isn't just a sigh. We inhale the world and breathe out meaning. While we can. While we can. "

― Salman Rushdie , The Moor's Last Sigh

3 " We crave permission openly to become our secret selves. "

― Salman Rushdie , The Moor's Last Sigh

4 " 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 , The Moor's Last Sigh

5 " we look up and we hope the stars look down, we pray that there may be stars for us to follow, stars moving across the heavens and leading us to our destiny, but it's only our vanity. We look at the galaxy and fall in love, but the universe cares less about us than we do about it, and the stars stay in their courses however much we may wish upon them to do otherwise. It's true that if you watch the sky-wheel turn for a while you'll see a meteor fall, flame and die. That's not a star worth following; it's just an unlucky rock. Our fates are here on earth. There are no guiding stars. "

― Salman Rushdie , The Moor's Last Sigh

6 " Ignorantly is how we all fall in love; for it is a kind of fall. Closing our eyes, we leap from that cliff in hope of a soft landing. Nor is it always soft; but still, without that leap nobody comes to life. "

― Salman Rushdie , The Moor's Last Sigh

7 " Abraham Zogoiby covered his face that night in August 1939 because he had been assailed by fear, [...] a sudden apprehension that the ugliness of life might defeat its beauty; that love did not make lovers invulnerable. Nevertheless, he thought, even if the world's beauty and love were on the edge of destruction, theirs would still be the only side to be on; defeated love would still be love, hate's victory would not make it other than it was. "

― Salman Rushdie , The Moor's Last Sigh

8 " If a birth is the fall-out from the explosion caused by the union of two unstable elements, then perhaps a half-life is all we can expect. "

― Salman Rushdie , The Moor's Last Sigh

9 " I had become a kind of information magpie, gathering to myself all manner of shiny scraps of fact and hokum and books and art-history and politics and music and film, and developing, too, a certain skill in manipulating and arranging these pitiful shards so that they glittered and caught the light. Fool's gold, or priceless nuggets mined from my singular childhood's rich bohemian seam? I leave it to others to decide. "

― Salman Rushdie , The Moor's Last Sigh

10 " I, however, was raised neither as Catholic nor as Jew. I was both, and nothing: a jewholic-anonymous, a cathjew nut, a stewpot, a mongrel cur. I was--what's the word these days?--atomised. Yessir: a real Bombay mix. "

― Salman Rushdie , The Moor's Last Sigh

11 " Confusion to our enemies! "

― Salman Rushdie , The Moor's Last Sigh

12 " they came in search of the hot stuff, just like any man calling on a tart. "

― Salman Rushdie , The Moor's Last Sigh

13 " I'll tell you a secret about fear: it's an absolutist. With fear, it's all or nothing. Either, like any bullying tyrant, it rules your life with stupid blinding omnipotence, or else you overthrow it, and its power vanishes in a puff of smoke. And another secret: the revolution against fear, the engendering of that tawdry despot's fall, has more or less nothing to do with 'courage'. It is driven by something much more straightforward: the simple need to get on with your life. "

― Salman Rushdie , The Moor's Last Sigh

14 " BOMBAY WAS CENTRAL, had been so from the moment of its creation: the bastard child of a Portuguese-English wedding, and yet the most Indian of Indian cities. In Bombay all Indias met and merged. In Bombay, too, all-India met what-was-not-India, what came across the black water to flow into our veins. Everything north of Bombay was North India, everything south of it was the South. To the east lay India’s East and to the west, the world’s West. Bombay was central; all rivers flowed into its human sea. It was an ocean of stories; we were all its narrators, and everybody talked at once. "

― Salman Rushdie , The Moor's Last Sigh

15 " Genius was being born in her, filling the empty spaces in her bed, her heart, her womb. She needed no-one but herself. "

― Salman Rushdie , The Moor's Last Sigh

16 " ...the true direction of her heart: that is to say, inwards, to the reality of dreams. "

― Salman Rushdie , The Moor's Last Sigh

17 " We, the living, must find what space we can alongside them; the giant dead whom we cannot tie down, though we grasp at their hair, though we rope them while they sleep "

― Salman Rushdie , The Moor's Last Sigh

18 " We look at the galaxy and fall in love, but the universe cares less about us than we do about it, and the stars stay in their courses however much we may wish upon them to do otherwise. It’s true that if you watch the sky-wheel turn for a while you’ll see a meteor fall, flame and die. That’s not a star worth following; it’s just an unlucky rock. Our fates are here on earth. There are no guiding stars. "

― Salman Rushdie , The Moor's Last Sigh

19 " Yes, I know there is a fashion nowadays for these Hitler's-valet type memoirs, and many people are against, they say we should not humanise the inhuman. But the point is they are not inhuman, these Mainduck-style little Hitlers, and it is in their humanity that we must locate our collective guilt, humanity's guilt for human beings' misdeeds; for if they are just monsters - if it is just a question of King Kong and Godzilla wreaking havoc until the aeroplanes bring them down - then the rest of us are excused. "

― Salman Rushdie , The Moor's Last Sigh

20 " There is a thing that lives in us, eating our food, breathing our air, looking out through our eyes, and when it comes out to play nobody is immune; possessed, we turn murderously upon one another, thing-darkness in our eyes and real weapons in our hands, neighbour against thing-ridden neighbour, thing-driven cousin against cousin, brother-thing against brother-thing, thing-child against thing-child. "

― Salman Rushdie , The Moor's Last Sigh