The alphabet is where all our secrets begin.
We walk unknowing amid the shadows of our past and, forgetting our history, are ignorant of ourselves.
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.
Burn the books and trust the Book; shred the papers and hear the Word.
It is the age of numbers, isn’t it? So we are numbers and the Elbees are words. We are mathemathics and they are poetry. We are winning and they are losing; and so of course they’re afraid of us, it’s like a struggle inside human nature itself, between what’s mechanical and utilitarian in us and the part that loves and dreams. We all fear that the cold machine-like thing in human nature will destroy our magic and song.
A little thinking is a dangerous thing.
Why demons, when man himself is a demon?′ the Nobel Laureate Singer’s ‘last demon’ asked from his attic in Tishevitz. To which Chamcha’s sense of balance, his much-to-be-said-for-and-against reflex, wished to add: ‘And why angels, when man is angelic too?
Nothing but trouble outside my head; nothing but miracles inside it.
Reality can have metaphorical content; that does not make it less real.
At the beginning of their work together Arthur Hibbert gave him a piece of advice he never forgot. “You must never write history,” Hibbert said, “until you can hear the people speak.” He thought about that for years, and in the end it came to feel like a valuable guiding principle for fiction as well. If you didn’t have a sense of how people spoke, you didn’t know them well enough, and so you couldn’t – you shouldn’t – tell their story.
If we can cease envisaging ourselves as metaphorical foetuses, and substitute the image of a newborn child, then that will be at least a small intellectual advance. In time, perhaps, we may even learn to toddle.
Most of the oppression of Muslims in the world right now is carried out by other Muslims.
Say we are from nowhere or anywhere or somewhere, we are make-believe people, frauds, reinventions, shapeshifters, which is to say, Americans.
I dislike arranged marriages. There are some mistakes for which one should not be able to blame one’s poor parents.
The Pages of Gup, now that they had talked through everything so fully, fought hard, remained united, support each other when required to do so, and in general looked like a force with a common purpose. All those arguments and debates, all that openness, had created powerful bonds of friendship between them.
O, Need’s a funny fish: it makes people untruthful. They all suffer from it, but they will not always admit.
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.
PLEASE BELIEVE that I am falling apart.
The art of the cinema,’ Truffaut allegedly said, ’is to point the camera at a beautiful woman.
Death and life were just adjacent verandas.