Knife Quotes

“Art is not a luxury. It stands at the essence of our humanity, and it asks for no special protection except the right to exist.”
― Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

“Something strange has happened to the idea of privacy in our surreal time. Instead of being cherished, it appears to have become, a valueless quality—actually undesirable. If a thing is not made public, it doesn’t really exist. Your dog, your wedding, your beach, your baby, your dinner, the interesting meme you recently saw—these things need, on a daily basis, to be shared. Where attention has become the thing most hungered for, where the quest for followers and likes is the new gluttony, privacy has become unnecessary, unwanted, even absurd.”
― Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

“This is who we are as a species: We contain within ourselves both the possibility of murdering an old stranger for almost no reason—the capacity in Shakespeare’s Iago which Coleridge called “motiveless Malignity”—and we also contain the antidote to that disease—courage, selflessness, the willingness to risk oneself to help that old stranger lying on the ground.”
― Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

“we would not be who we are today without the calamities of our yesterdays.”
― Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

“When Death comes very close to you, the rest of the world goes far away and you can feel a great loneliness. At such a time kind words are comforting and strengthening.”
― Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

“We are engaged in a world war of stories—a war between incompatible versions of reality—and we need to learn how to fight it. A tyrant has arisen in Russia and brutality engulfs Ukraine, whose people, led by a satirist turned hero, offer heroic resistance, and are already creating a legend of freedom. The tyrant creates false narratives to justify his assault—the Ukrainians are Nazis, and Russia is menaced by Western conspiracies. He seeks to brainwash his own citizens with such lying stories. Meanwhile, America is sliding back towards the Middle Ages, as white supremacy exerts itself not only over Black bodies, but over women’s bodies too. False narratives rooted in antiquated religiosity and bigoted ideas from hundreds of years ago are used to justify this, and find willing audiences and believers. In India, religious sectarianism and political authoritarianism go hand in hand, and violence grows as democracy dies. Once again, false narratives of Indian history are in play, narratives that privilege the majority and oppress minorities; and these narratives, let it be said, are popular, just as the Russian tyrant’s lies are believed. This, now, is the ugly dailiness of the world. How should we respond? It has been said, I have said it myself, that the powerful may own the present, but writers own the future, for it is through our work, or the best of it at least, the work which endures into that future, that the present misdeeds of the powerful will be judged. But how can we think of the future when the present screams for our attention, and what, if we turn away from posterity and pay attention to this dreadful moment, can we usefully or effectively do? A poem will not stop a bullet. A novel cannot defuse a bomb. Not all our satirists are heroes. But we are not helpless. Even after Orpheus was torn to pieces, his severed head, floating down the river Hebrus, went on singing, reminding us that the song is stronger than death. We can sing the truth and name the liars, we can join in solidarity with our fellows on the front lines and magnify their voices by adding our own to them. Above all, we must understand that stories are at the heart of what’s happening, and the dishonest narratives of oppressors have proved attractive to many. So we must work to overturn the false narratives of tyrants, populists, and fools by telling better stories than they do, stories within which people want to live. The battleground is not only on the battlefield. The stories we live in are contested territories too. Perhaps we can seek to emulate Joyce’s Dedalus, who sought to forge, in the smithy of his soul, the uncreated conscience of his race. We can emulate Orpheus and sing on in the face of horror, and not stop singing until the tide turns, and a better day begins.”
― Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

“Waiting is thinking, and to think deeply is, very often, to change one’s mind.”
― Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

“During those empty, sleepless nights, I thought a lot about The Knife as an idea. A knife was a tool, and acquired meaning from the use we made of it. Language, too, was a knife. I could cut open the world and reveal its meaning, its inner workings, its secrets, its truths. It could cut through from one reality to another. It could call bullshit, open people's eyes, create beauty. Language was my knife. If I had unexpectedly been caught in an unwanted knife fight, maybe this was the knife I could use to fight back.”
― Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

“His courage is a consequence of who he is.”
― Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

“An intimacy of strangers. That's a phrase I've sometimes used to express the joyful thing that happens in the act of reading, that happy union of the interior lives of author and reader.”
― Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

“So my first thought when I saw this murderous shape rushing toward me was: So it’s you. Here you are.”
― Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

“I have always believed that love is a force, that in its most potent form it can move mountains. It can change the world.”
― Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

“To have a room of one’s own, one must have money. (I don’t think Virginia Woolf ever went to India, but her dictum stands, even there, even for men.)”
― Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

“The most important of these things is that art challenges orthodoxy”
― Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

“I don’t usually think of my books as prophecies. I’ve had some trouble with prophets in my life, and I’m not applying for the job.”
― Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

“Children going to school, a congregation in a synagogue, shoppers in a supermarket, a man on the stage of an amphitheater are all, so to speak, inhabiting a stable picture of the world. A school is a place of education. A synagogue is a place of worship. A supermarket is a place to shop. A stage is a performance space. That’s the frame in which they see themselves. Violence smashes that picture. Suddenly they don’t know the rules—what to say, how to behave, what choices to make. They no longer know the shape of things. Reality dissolves and is replaced by the incomprehensible”
― Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

“Happiness writes in white ink on white pages. In other words, you can’t make it appear on the page. It’s invisible.”
― Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

“But as we stood there in the stillness I realized that a burden had lifted from me somehow, and the best word I could find for what I was feeling was lightness. A circle had been closed, and I was doing what I had hoped I could do here - I was making my peace with what had happened, making my peace with my life. I stood where I had almost been killed, wearing, I have to tell you, my new Ralph Lauren suit, and I felt... whole.”
― Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

“However, as the attentive reader will have guessed, I survived.”
― Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

“I wanted to say: I believe that art is a waking dream. And that imagination can bridge the gulf between dreams and reality and allow us to understand the real in new ways by seeing it through the lens of the unreal. No, I don’t believe in miracles, but, yes, my books do, and, to use Whitman’s formulation, do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. I don’t believe in miracles, but my survival is miraculous. Okay, then. So be it. The reality of my books—oh, call it magic realism if you must—is now the actual reality in which I’m living. Maybe my books had been building that bridge for decades, and now the miraculous could cross it. The magic had become realism. Maybe my books saved my life.”
― Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

“Even better than that: it was a relationship not of competitiveness but of total mutual support. Happiness.”
― Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

“On such coin-toss moments a life can turn. Chance determines our fates at least as profoundly as choice, or those nonexistent notions karma, qismat, “destiny.”
― Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

“I have no need of commandments, popes, or god-men of any sort to hand down my morals to me. I have my own ethical sense, thank you very much. God did not hand down morality to us. We created God to embody our moral instincts.”
― Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

“To regret what your life has been is the true folly, I told myself, because the person doing the regretting has been shaped by the life he subsequently regrets.”
― Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

“This is who we are as a species: We contain within ourselves both the possibility of murdering an old stranger for almost no reason - the capacity in Shakespeare's Iago which Coleridge called "motiveless Malignity" - and we also contain the antidote to that disease - courage, selflessness, the willingness to risk oneself to help that old stranger lying on the ground.”
― Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

“The most important of these things is that art challenges orthodoxy. To reject or vilify art because it does that is to fail to understand its nature. Art sets the artist's passionate personal vision against the received ideas of its time. Art knows that recieved ideas are the enemies of art, as Flaubert told us in Bouvard and Pecuchet. Cliches are received ideas and so are ideologies, both those which depend on the sanction of invisible sky gods and those which do not. Without art, our ability to think, to see freshly, and to renew our world would wither and die.

Art is not a luxury. It stands at the essence of our humanity, and it asks for no special protection except the right to exist.

It accepts argument, criticism, even rejection. It does not accept violence.”
― Salman Rushdie;, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

“A person filled with gumption doesn’t sit around dissipating and stewing about things. He’s at the front of the train of his own awareness, watching to see what’s up the track and meeting it when it comes.”
― Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

“God did not hand down morality to us. We created God to embody our moral instincts.”
― Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

“I want that on a T-shirt: Fran Lebowitz thinks about me every day”
― Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

“In the next months there would be many more such bodily humiliations. In the presence of serious injuries, your body’s privacy ceases to exist, you lose autonomy over your physical self, over the vessel in which you sail. You allow this because you have no alternative. You surrender the captaincy of your ship so that it won’t sink.”
― Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder