The Eleventh Hour Quotes

“I listened to her string of non sequiturs, entranced. I understood what she was telling us. There was no coherence. Nothing led to anything else. There were only jagged moments of half comprehension. Nothing could be known. We were all incomplete, unfinished. That was life until completed by death. And none of us could complete our own story because we would no longer be present. We were all frozen in our railway carriages waiting for another to finish our tale, to complete us, if anyone cared to do so. Otherwise, unfinishedness was our inescapable fate.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Eleventh Hour: A Quintet of Stories

“He was disappointed in the young. They should have understood the danger of a dictatorial ruler and made it their generation’s calling to fight him until he was overthrown (...)

And most of the younger generation were preoccupied by other squabbles, the young men, fearing and wanting to crush the independence of young women, turned out to like the “manliness” of the king, and young women had their own preoccupations. In short the young were engaged in their own little squabbles so that the big squabble, the crucial squabble against the tyrant, went unsquabbled (...)”
― Salman Rushdie, The Eleventh Hour: A Quintet of Stories

“There were murderers looking for the right people to murder, people whose deaths would gain the approval of the king. There were jesters-in-reverse whose job was not to make the king laugh or to tell him uncomfortable truths but to laugh uncontrollably at the king’s humorless witticisms and listen to and applaud his barefaced lies. There were members of criminal gangs whom the king had placed in charge of the police force. There were crooked lawyers, crooked judges, crooked legal clerks, all there to make sure that the laws of the land would crumble and fail beneath the stamping foot of the king who had placed himself above the law.
(...)
when the king married not one but two of his nieces, the word incest was simply expunged from the lexicon and made illegal to use; and after that it became necessary to make other changes to the dictionary, to redescribe rape as love, horror as patriotism, bullying as good governance, war as peace, freedom as slavery, and ignorance as strength, so as to ensure that the absolute monarch had absolute power over the language itself, over vocabulary and syntax and metaphor and fable, and to turn the world upside down, so that it would only mean what the monarch wished it to mean.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Eleventh Hour: A Quintet of Stories

“Times have changed. Our people care less for our beautiful and complex language than for the great, crude questions of what is correct and what incorrect. We have ceased to be the poetry lovers we once were, the aficionados of ambiguity and devotees of doubt, and we have become bar-room moralists.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Eleventh Hour: A Quintet of Stories

“I'm tired of young men. They are greedy for me and I don't even have enough of me to feed myself.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Eleventh Hour: A Quintet of Stories

“They were eighty-one years old. If old age was thought of as an evening, ending in midnight oblivion, they were well into the eleventh hour.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Eleventh Hour: A Quintet of Stories

“This was not an immortal paradise. It was the anteroom to hell.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Eleventh Hour: A Quintet of Stories

“another line attributed to Einstein, “The more I study science the more I believe in God,”
― Salman Rushdie, The Eleventh Hour: A Quintet of Stories

“Albert Einstein’s famous letter to Eric Gutkind in which he had declared that “the word God is for me nothing but the expression and product of human weakness”—”
― Salman Rushdie, The Eleventh Hour: A Quintet of Stories