Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children
14 quotes
"Tai tapped his left nostril. 'You know what this is, Nakkoo? It's the place where the outside world meets the world inside you."
"It has been observed that all Americans need a frontier: pain was hers, and she was determined to push it out."
"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 inevitably seems more and more incredible."
"Children get food shelter pocket money longholidays and love, all of it apparently free gratis, and most of the little fools think it's a sort of compensation for having been born. 'There are no strings on me!' They sang; but I, pinnoccio, saw the strings. Parents are impelled by the profit motive - nothing more, nothing less. For their attentions, they expected, from me, the immense dividend of greatness."
"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."
"Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive."
"Memory's 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 version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own."
"Shiva and Saleem, victor and victim; understand our rivalry, and you will gain understanding of the age in which you live. (The reverse of this statement is also true.)"
"Parents are impelled by the profit motive - nothing more, nothing less. For their attentions, they expected, from me, the immense dividend of greatness."
"Love, my child, is a thing that every mother learns; it is not born with a baby, but made; and for eleven years, I have learned to love you as my son."
"The world is full of love stories, and all lovers are in a sense the avatars of their predecessors."
"She has vivid pictures of Hell. It is as hot as Rajputana in June and everyone is made to learn seven foreign languages . . ."
"I should never have dreamed of purpose, I am coming to the conclusion that privacy, the small individual lives of men, are preferable to all this inflated macrocosmic activity."
"Symbolic value of the pickling process: all the six hundred million eggs which gave birth to the population of India could fit inside a single, standard-sized pickle-jar; six hundred million spermatozoa could be lifted on a single spoon. Every pickle-jar (you will forgive me if I become florid for a moment) contains, therefore, the most exalted of possibilities: the feasibility of the chutnification of history; the grand hope of the pickling of time!"