The Satanic Verses Quotes

Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.

From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.

Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.

What kind of idea are you? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accomodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damnfool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? – The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of hundred, be smashed to bits; but, the hundredth time, will change the world.

Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.

So India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in God’s name. The problem’s name is God.

You can't judge an internal injury by the size of the hole.

Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet...Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.

Not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite; our hopes spill over its rim.

Question: What is the opposite of faith? Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself is a kind of belief. Doubt.

When you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible.

Everest silences you...when you come down, nothing seems worth saying, nothing at all. You find the nothingness wrapping you up, like a sound. Non-being. You can't keep it up, of course. the world rushes in soon enough. What shuts you up is, I think, the sight you've had of perfection: why speak if you can't manage perfect thoughts, perfect sentences? It feels like a betrayal of what you've been through. But it fades; you accept that certain compromises, closures, are required if you're to continue.

An iceberg is water striving to be land; a mountain, especially a Himalaya, especially Everest, is land's attempt to metamorphose into sky; it is grounded in flight, the earth mutated--nearly--into air, and become, in the true sense, exalted. Long before she ever encountered the mountain, Allie was aware of its brooding presence in her soul.

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.

To be born again,' sang Gibreal Farishta tumbling from the heaveans, 'first you have to die. Ho ji! Ho ji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly Tat-taa! Takatun! How to ever smile again, if first you won't cry? How to win the darling's love mister, without a sigh?.

A people that has remained convinced of its greatness and invulnerability, that has chosen to believe such a myth in the face of all the evidence, is a people in the grip of a kind of sleep, or madness.

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.

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

The fact of being alive compensated for what life did to one.

Maybe unhappiness is the continuum through which a human life moves, and joy just a series of blips, of islands in the stream.

Is birth always a fall?.

Exile is a dream of 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. He hangs there, frozen in time, translated into a photograph; denied motion, suspended impossibly above his native earth, he awaits the inevitable moment at which the photograph must begin to move, and the earth reclaim its own.

We strive for heights bit our natures betray us, Chamcha thought; clowns in search of crowns. The bitterness overcame him.

What happens when you win? When your enemies are at your mercy: how will you act then? Compromise is the temptation of the weak; this is the test for the strong.