Saugata Bandyopadhyay > Saugata's Quotes

“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.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced."

[Books vs. Goons, L.A. Times, April 24, 2005]”
― Salman Rushdie

“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.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.”
― Salman Rushdie

“Fundamentalism isn't about religion, it's about power.”
― Salman Rushdie

“Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.”
― Salman Rushdie

“Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.”
― Salman Rushdie

“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.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“We all owe death a life.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“Nothing comes from nothing, Thieflet; no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old--it is the new combinations that make them new.”
― Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories

“Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“The inevitable triumph of illusion over reality that was the single most obvious truth about the history of the human race.”
― Salman Rushdie , Shalimar the Clown

“What can't be cured must be endured.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.”
― Salman Rushdie

“Once upon a time there was a mother who, in order to become a mother, had agreed to change her name; who set herself the task of falling in love with her husband bit-by-bit, but who could n ever manage to love one part, the part, curiously enough, which made possible her motherhood; whose feet were hobbled by verrucas and whose shoulders were stooped beneath the accumulating guilts of the world; whose husband's unlovable organ failed to recover from the effects of a freeze; and who, like her husband, finally succumbed to the mysteries of telephones, spending long minutes listening to the words of wrong-number callers . . . shortly after my tenth birthday (when I had recovered from the fever which has recently returned to plague me after an interval of nearly twenty-one years), Amina Sinai resumed her recent practice of leaving suddenly, and always immediately after a wrong number, on urgent shopping trips.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“[...]the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow
Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead
Walk beside me… just be my friend”
― Albert Camus

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
― Albert Camus

“Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.”
― Albert Camus

“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.”
― Albert Camus

“Live to the point of tears.”
― Albert Camus

“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.”
― Albert Camus

“I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.”
― Albert Camus, L'Étranger

“Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.”
― Albert Camus

“What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.”
― Salman Rushdie