Salman Rushdie Zitate

seite 3

„Voller Entsetzen begriffen sie, dass dies der letzte & schlimmste Trick des Dschungels war, dass er sie, indem er ihre Herzenswünsche erfüllte, dazu verleitete, ihre Träume aufzubrauchen, so dass sie, während ihr Traumleben ihnen entschlüpfte, so hohl & durchsichtig wie Glas wurden.“

„Kinder machen sich Phantasievorstellungen von ihren Vätern, formen sie sich nach ihren kindlichen Bedürfnissen. Die Realität eines Vaters ist eine Last, die nur wenige Söhne zu tragen vermögen.“

„Religion, eine mittelalterliche Form der Unvernunft, wird, wenn sie mit modernen Waffen kombiniert wird, zu einer echten Gefahr unserer Freiheiten.“

„In dem Moment, in dem du sagst, ein Ideensystem muss fürchten, egal, ob es sich um ein religiöses Glaubenssystem oder eine säkulare Ideologie handelt, in dem Moment, in dem man eine Reihe von Ideen für immun gegen Kritik, Satire, Spott oder Verachtung erklärt, wird die Freiheit des Denkens unmöglich.“

„Ein Buch ist solange nicht vollendet, bis es gelesen wurde.“

„Zu viele Leute hatten zu viel Zeit damit verbracht, mich zu dämonisieren oder als Götzenbild darzustellen, um ernsthaft zu hören, was ich zu sagen hatte.“

“He knew what he knew: that the real world was full of magic, so magical worlds could easily be real.”

“I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.”

“perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque.”

“A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.”

“What you were is forever who you are.”

“For every snake, there is a ladder; for every ladder, a snake”

“It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.”

“The lessons one learns at school are not always the ones the school thinks it's teaching.”

“Everything has shape, if you look for it. There is no escape from form.”

“Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained.”

“India, the new myth--a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God.”

“Happy endings must come at the end of something,' the Walrus pointed out. 'If they happen in the middle of a story, or an adventure, or the like, all they do is cheer things up for awhile.”

“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.”

“There is nothing like a War for the reinvention of lives…”

“optimism is a disease”

“… because silence, too, has an echo, hollower and longer-lasting than the reverberations of any sound.”

“What's the use of stories that aren't even true?”

“Only the foolish, blinded by language's conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at it's melancholy rim, green in it's envious heart. It may burn white, or even, in it's greatest rages, black.”

“Exile is a dream of a glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air.”

“My horizon's have shrunk and I have only endings to write.”

“People don't like being around despair. Our tolerance for the truly hopeless, for those who are irredeemably broken by life is strictly limited. The sob stories we like are the ones that end before we're bored.”

“Nobody can judge an internal injury by the size of the superficial wound.”

“If I were asked for a one-sentence sound
bite on religion, I would say I was against it.”

“My heart broke open and history fell in.”

“Between shame and shamelessness lies the axis upon which we turn; meteorological conditions at both these poles are of the most extreme, ferocious type. Shamelessness, shame: the roots of violence.”

“What grows best in the heat: fantasy; unreason; lust.”

“If love is a yearning to be like (even to become) the beloved, then hatred, it must be said, can be engendered by the same ambition, when it cannot be fulfilled.”

“The inevitable triumph of illusion over reality that was the single most obvious truth about the history of the human race.”

“A man who catches History's eye is thereafter bound to a mistress from whom he will never escape.”