The Enchantress of Florence Quotes

“If you were an atheist, Birbal," the Emperor challenged his first minister, "what would you say to the true believers of all the great religions of the world?" Birbal was a devout Brahmin from Trivikrampur, but he answered unhesitatingly, "I would say to them that in my opinion they were all atheists as well; I merely believe in one god less than each of them." "How so?" the Emperor asked. "All true believers have good reasons for disbelieving in every god except their own," said Birbal. "And so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in none."

-- From "The Shelter of the World”
― Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence

“Make as much racket as you like people. Noise is life and an excess of noise is a sign that life is good. There will be time for us all to be quiet when we are safely dead.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence

“This may be the curse of human race . Not that we are different from one anther , but we are so alike .”
― Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence

“My horizon's have shrunk and I have only endings to write.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence

“Without water we are nothing", the traveler thought. "Even an emperor, denied water, would swiftly turn to dust. Water is the real monarch and we are all its slaves.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence

“All true believers have good reasons for disbelieving in every god except their own,' said Birbal, 'and so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in none.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence

“Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in ritual, unthinking obeisance before a deity but rather, perhaps, in the slow clumsy, error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence

“Sometimes by a woodland stream he watched the water rush over the pebbled bed, its tiny modulations of bounce and flow. A woman's body was like that. If you watched it carefully enough you could see how it moved to the rhythm of the world, the deep rhythm, the music below the music, the truth below the truth. He believed in this hidden truth the way other men believed in God or love, believed that truth was in fact always hidden, that the apparent, the overt, was invariably a kind of lie.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence

“Travel was pointless. It removed you from the place in which you had a meaning, and to which you gave meaning in return by dedicating your life to it, and it spirited you away into fairylands where you were, and looked, frankly absurd.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence

“Language upon a silvered tongue affords enchantment enough.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence

“...that witchcraft requires no potions, familiar spirits, or magic wands. Language upon a silver tongue affords enchantment enough.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence

“He had picked up languages the way most sailors pick up diseases; languages were his gonorrhoea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague, his plague.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence

“He did not wish to be divine. If there had never been a God, the emperor thought, it might have been easier to work out what goodness was. This business of worship, of the abnegation of self in the face of the Almighty, was a distraction, a false trail. Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in ritual, unthinking obeisance before a deity but rather, perhaps, in the slow, clumsy, error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence

“Why obliterate the exceptional merely in order to make the outstanding look finer than it was?”
― Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence

“Knowledge was never simply born in the human mind; it was always reborn. The relaying of wisdom from one age to the next, this cycle of rebirths: this was wisdom.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence

“History could claw upward as well as down. The powerful could be deafened by the cries of the poor.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence

“This was what was left of a human individual when you took away his home,his family, his friends, his city, his country,his world: a being without context, whose past had faded, whose future was bleak, an entity stripped of name, of meaning,of the whole of life except a temporarily beating heart.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence

“Then a strange moment came, a moment of the kind that determines the fate of nations, because when a crowd loses its fear of an army the world changes.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence

“Imagine a pair of woman’s lips,” Mogor whispered, “puckering for a kiss. That is the city of Florence, narrow at the edges, swelling at the center, with the Arno flowing through between, parting the two lips, the upper and the lower. The city is an enchantress. When it kisses you, you are lost, whether you be commoner or king.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence

“And in Kandahar he was taught about survival, about fighting and killing and hunting, and he learned much else without being taught, such as looking out for himself and watching his tongue and not saying the wrong thing, the thing that might get him killed. About the dignity of the lost, about losing, and how it cleansed the soul to accept defeat, and about letting go, avoiding the trap of holding on too tightly to what you wanted, and about abandonment in general, and in particular fatherlesness, the lessness of fathers, the lessness of the fatherless, and the best defenses of those who are less against those who are more: inwardness, forethought, cunning, humility and good peripheral vision. The many lessons of lessness. The lessening from which growing could begin.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence

“All men needed to hear their stories told. He was a man, but if he died without telling the story he would be something less than that, an albino cockroach, a louse. The dungeon did not udnerstand the idea of as tory. The dungeon was static, eternal, black and a story needed motion adn tiem and light. He felt his story slipping away from him, beocming inconsequential, ceasing to be. He has no story. There was no story. He was not a man. There was no man here. There was only the dungeon, and the slithering dark.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence

“Már régen tökélyre vitte azt a képességet, hogy csak azt lássa, akit látni akar, ami létfontosságú készség, ha az ember a világnak nem áldozata, hanem ura akar lenni.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence

“ბავშვობა იყო იმაზე ფიქრი, თითქოს ვიღაცამ მეტი იცოდა შენ შესახებ, ვიდრე თვითონ შენ და ამიტომ ჯობდა, შენი ბედი მისთვის მიგენდო. ღმერთს სწორედ იმას საყვედურობდა, რომ მისდამი რწმენა ადამიანს საკუთარი თავის, როგორც პიროვნების ჩამოყალიბების საშუალებას ართმევს.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence

“If power was a a cry, then human lives were lived in the echo of the cries of others.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence

“After they stopped torturing him they locked him in the jail cell again and pretended they would forget him... Then, eventually, and unexpectedly, release. Into ignominy, oblivion, married life.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence

“Later, when his desires had been satisfied, he slept in an odorous whorehouse, snoring lustily next to an insomniac tart, and dreamed. He could dream in seven languages: Italian, Spanic, Arabic, Persian, Russian, English and Portughese. He had picked up languages the way most sailors picked up diseases; languages were his gonorrhea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague,his plague. As soon as he fell asleep half the world started babbling in his brain, telling wondrous travelers' tales. In this half-discovered world every day brought news of fresh enchantments. The visionary, revelatory dream-poetry of the quotidian had not yet been crushed by blinkered, prosy fact. Himself a teller of tales, he had been driven out of his door by stories of wonder, and by one in particular, a story which could make his fortune or else cost him his life.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence

“Atata timp cat esti anesteziat si nu iti simti tragedia propriei vieti, poti supravietui. Cand iti revine limpezimea, cand iti este meticulos redata, te poate innebuni. memoria retrezita la viata te poate sminti, amintirea umilintei, a celor ce ti s-au intamplat fara stirea ta, a atator intruziuni, amintirea barbatilor. Nu un palat, ci un bordel al amintirilor, iar dincolo de aceste amintiri, constiinta faptului ca toti cei care te-au iubit sunt morti, ca nu exista nici o scapare. un asemenea gand te poate ridica in picioare, te poate face sa iti aduni fortele si sa o iei la goana. Daca fugi destul de tare poate vei scapa de trecut si de amintirea a tot ce ti s-a intamplat, si totodata de viitor, de intunericul inevitabil ce ti se intinde in fata.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence

“Who hopes for an hour hopes for eternity. The world in an hour. What follows is unseen.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence

“He wanted, for example, to investigate why one should hold fast to a religion not because it was true but because it was the faith of one’s fathers. Was faith not faith but simple family habit? Maybe there was no true religion but only this eternal handing down. And error could be handed down as easily as virtue. Was faith no more than an error of our ancestors?”
― Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence

“You observe … that when it’s time to unleash a few insults, a man will always choose his mother tongue.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence