Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights Quotes

“everything is relative, one man’s absolute belief is another man’s fairy tale;”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“At the beginning of all love there is a private treaty each of the lovers makes with himself or herself, an agreement to set aside what is wrong with the other for the sake of what is right. Love is spring after winter. It comes to heal life's wounds, inflicted by the unloving cold. When that warmth is born in the heart the imperfections of the beloved are as nothing, less than nothing, and the secret treaty with oneself is easy to sign. The voice of doubt is stilled. Later, when love fades, the secret treaty looks like folly, but if so, it's a necessary folly, born of lovers' belief in beauty, which is to say, in the possibility of the impossible thing, true love.”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“In the end, rage, no matter how profoundly justified, destroys the enraged. Just as we are created anew by what we love, so we are reduced and unmade by what we hate.”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“You will see, as time goes by", said Ibn Rushd, "that in the end it will be religion that will make men turn away from God. The godly are God's worst advocates.”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“We were all trapped in stories, she said, just as he used to say, his wavy hair, his naughty smile, his beautiful mind, each of us the prisoner of our own solipsistic narrative, each family the captive of the family story, each community locked within its own tale of itself, each people the victims of their own versions of history, and there were parts of the world where the narratives collided and went to war, where there were two or more incompatible stories fighting for space on, to speak, the same page. She came from one such place, his place, from which he had been forever displaced, they exiled his body but his spirit, never. And maybe now every place was becoming that place, maybe Lebanon was everywhere and nowhere, so that we were all exiles, even if our hair wasn't so wavy, our smiles not so naughty, our minds less beautiful, even the name Lebanon wasn't necessary, the name of every place or any place would do just as well, maybe that's why she felt nameless, unnamed, unnameable, Lebanonymous.”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“When Alice fell down the rabbit hole, it was an accident, but when she stepped through the looking glass, it was of her own free will, and a braver deed by far.”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“...this is our tragedy, she said in his words, our fictions are killing us, but if we didn’t have those fictions, maybe that would kill us too.”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“let me belong again to that faraway place I left so long ago, from which I am alienated, and which has forgotten me, in which I am an alien now even though it was the place where I began, let me belong again, walk those streets knowing they are mine, knowing that my story is a part of those streets, even though it isn't, it hasn't been for most of a lifetime, let it be so, let it be so”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“The enemy is stupid, he replied. That is ground for hope. There is no originality in tyrants, and they learn nothing from the demise of their precursors. They will be brutal and stifling and engender hatred and destroy what men love and that will defeat them. All important battles are, in the end, conflicts between hatred and love, and we must hold to the idea that love is stronger than hate.”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“In the end, rage, no matter how profoundly justified, destroys the enraged.”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“You will see, as time goes by,” said Ibn Rushd, “that in the end it will be religion that will make men turn away from God. The godly are God’s worst advocates. It may take a thousand and one years but in the end religion will shrivel away and only then will we begin to live in God’s truth.”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“How treacherous history is! Half-truths, ignorance, deceptions, false trails, errors, and lies, and buried somewhere in between all of that, the truth, in which it is easy to lose faith, of which it is consequently easy to say, it’s a chimera, there’s no such thing, everything is relative, one man’s absolute belief is another man’s fairy tale; but about which we insist, we insist most emphatically, that it is too important an idea to give up to the relativity merchants.”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“Human sanity was a poor, fragile thing at best,”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“Beware the man (or jinni) of action when he finally seeks to better himself with thought. A little thinking is a dangerous thing.”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“This is known, and what is not known does not undermine it. This is the scientific way. To be open about the limits of one’s knowledge increases public confidence in what one says is known.”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“These stories become what we know, what we understand, and what we are, or, perhaps we should say, what we have become, or can perhaps be.”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“Our group takes what I'll call a Post-Atheist stance. Our position is that god is a creation of human beings, who only exists because of the clap-hands-if-you-believe-in-fairies principle. If enough people were sensible enough not to clap hands, then this Tinker Bell god would die. However, unfortunately, billions of human beings are still prepared to defend their belief in some sort of god-fairy, and, as a result, god exists. What’s worse is that he is now running amok.”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“he wished he could have roots spreading under every inch of his lost soil, his beloved lost home, that he could have been part of something, that he could have been himself, walking down the road not taken, living a life in context and not the migrant's hollow journey that had been his fate”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“She allowed history to leave her without trying to hold it back, the way children allow a grand parade to pass, holding it in their memory, making it an unforgettable thing, making it their own”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“And lo, there, immediately, was god, and he was furious. ‘How did you come up with the idea of me,’ he demanded, ‘who asked you to do that?’ and he threw them out of the garden, into, of all places, Iraq. ‘No good deed goes unpunished,’ said Eve to Adam, and that ought to be the motto of the entire human race. The”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“A little thinking is a dangerous thing.”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“To be thin-skinned, far-sighted, and loose-tongued," he said, "is to feel too sharply, see too clearly, speak too freely. It is to be vulnerable to the world when the world believes itself invulnerable, to understand its mutability when it thinks itself immutable, to sense what's coming before others sense it, to know that the barbarian future is tearing down the gates of the present while others cling to the decadent, hollow past. If our children are fortunate they will only inherit your ears, but regrettably, as they are undeniably mine, they will probably think too much too soon, and hear too much too early, including things that are not permitted to be thought or heard.”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“If you walk away from God you should probably try to stay in the good books of Luck.”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“It was the resilience in human beings that represented their best chance of survival, their ability to look the unimaginable, the unconscionable, the unprecedented in the eye.”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“In the end, rage, no matter how profoundly justified, destroys the enraged. Just as we created anew by what we love, so we are reduced and unmade by what we hate.”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“This is our tragedy....our fictions are killing us, but if we didn't have those fictions, maybe that would kill us too.”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“Maybe in the case of true human, their mind, their soul, their consciousness flows through their bodies like blood, inhabiting every cell of their physical being, and so Aristotle was right, in humans the mind and body are one and cannot be separated, the self is both with the body and perishes with it too. She imagined that union with a thrill. How lucky human beings were if that was the case, she wanted to tell Geronimo who was and was not Ibn Rushd: lucky and doomed. When their hearts pounded with excitement their souls pounded too, when their pulses raced their spirits were aroused, hen their eyes moistened with tears of happiness it was their minds that felt the joy. Their minds touched the people their fingers touched, and when they in turn were touched by others it was as if two consciousnesses were briefly joined. The mind gave the body sensuality, it allowed the body to taste delight and to smell love in their lover's sweet perfume; not only their bodies but their minds, too, made love. And at the end the soul, as mortal as the body, learned the last great lesson of life, which was the body's death.”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“She wanted to say, I am made of smoke. My mind is smoke, my thoughts are smoke, I am all smoke and only smoke. This body is a garment I put on, which by my magic art I have made capable of functioning as a human body functions, it's so biologically perfect that it can conceive children and pop them out in threes, fours and fives. Yet I am not of this body and could, if I chose, inhabit another woman, or an antelope, or a gnat. Aristotle was wrong, for I have lived for aeons, and altered by body when I chose, like a garment of which I had grown tired. The mind and the body are two, she wanted to say, but she knew it would disappoint him to be disagreed with, so she held her tongue.”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“The strangenesses are multiplying, he wrote in his article, though the world before they began was already a strange place, so often it's difficult to know if an event falls into the category of the old, ordinary strangenesses or the new, extraordinary variety.”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“They came into being simultaneously in a garden, Eve and Adam, fully grown and naked and enjoying you could say the first Big Bang, and they had no idea how they got there until a snake led them to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and when they ate its fruit they both simultaneously came up with the idea of a creator-god, a good- and-evil decider, a gardener-god who made the garden, otherwise where did the garden come from, and then planted them in it like rootless plants. And”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights