The Satanic Verses

by Salman Rushdie

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

From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable. He moves in mysterious ways: men say. Small wonder, then, that women have turned to me.

‘A poet’s work,’ he answers. ‘To name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.’ And if rivers of blood flow from the cuts his verses inflict, then they will nourish him.

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

Maybe, after all, love was more durable than hate; even if love changed, some shadow of it, some lasting shape, persisted.