Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

by Salman Rushdie

In death we are all yesterday’s people, trapped forever in the past tense.

Chance determines our fates at least as profoundly as choice, or those nonexistent notions karma, qismat, “destiny.”

To say, at such a historical moment, “I am happy”—wasn’t that a luxury? A form of chosen blindness, willful, selfish?