The Golden House Quotes

“This is how we are: we fall in love with each other’s strengths, but love deepens towards permanence when we fall in love with each other’s weaknesses.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Golden House

“America had left reality behind and entered the comic-book universe.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Golden House

“It had been more than a year since the Joker’s conquest of America and we were all still in shock and going through the stages of grief but now we needed to come together and set love and beauty and solidarity and friendship against the monstrous forces that faced us. Humanity was the only answer to the cartoon. I had no plan except love. I hoped another plan might emerge in time but for now there was only holding each other tightly and passing strength to each other, body to body, mouth to mouth, spirit to spirit, me to you.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Golden House

“How does one live amongst one’s fellow countrymen and countrywomen when you don’t know which of them is numbered amongst the sixty-million-plus who brought the horror to power, when you can’t tell who should be counted among the ninety-million-plus who shrugged and stayed home, or when your fellow Americans tell you that knowing things is elitist and they hate elites, and all you have ever had is your mind and you were brought up to believe in the loveliness of knowledge, not that knowledge-is-power nonsense, but knowledge is beauty, and then all of that, education, art, music, film, becomes a reason for being loathed…”
― Salman Rushdie, The Golden House

“We fell into the love that had been lying beneath our love like water below ice, and understood that while we had been having a lot of fun together we had only been skating on the surface, and now we were in as deep as we could go.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Golden House

“The old man has always believed in the mutability of things; has known that no matter how solid the ground beneath your feet may seem, it can, at any moment, turn into quicksand and suck you down. Always be prepared.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Golden House

“In these our cowardly times, we deny the grandeur of the Universal, and assert and glorify our local Bigotries, and so we cannot agree on much. In these our degenerate times, men bent on nothing but vainglory and personal gain- hollow, bombastic men for whom nothing is off-limits if it advances their petty cause- will claim to be great leaders and benefactors, acting in the common good, and calling all who oppose them liars, envious, little people, stupid people, stiff, and, in a precise reversal of the truth, dishonest and corrupt.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Golden House

“It did not occur to any of them that their decision was born of a colossal sense of entitlement, this notion that they could just step away from yesterday and start tomorrow as if it wasn't a part of the same week, to move beyond memory and roots and language and race into the land of the self-made self, which is another way of saying, America.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Golden House

“In these our degenerate times, men bent on nothing but vainglory and personal gain – hollow, bombastic men for whom nothing is off-limits if it advances their petty cause – will claim to be great leaders”
― Salman Rushdie, The Golden House

“Now the only person you think is lying to you is the expert who actually knows something. He’s the one not to believe because he’s the elite and the elites are against the people, they will do the people down. To know the truth is to be elite. If you say you saw God’s face in a watermelon, more people will believe you than if you find the Missing Link, because if you’re a scientist then you’re elite. Reality TV is fake but it’s not elite so you buy it. The news: that’s elite.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Golden House

“Sometimes the bad guys win and what does one do when the world one believes in turns out to be a paper moon and a dark planet rises and says, No, I am the world. How does one live amongst one’s fellow countrymen and countrywomen when you don’t know which of them is numbered amongst the sixty-million-plus who brought the horror to power, when you can’t tell who should be counted among the ninety-million-plus who shrugged and stayed home, or when your fellow Americans tell you that knowing things is elitist and they hate elites, and all you have ever had is your mind and you were brought up to believe in the loveliness of knowledge, not that knowledge-is-power nonsense but knowledge is beauty, and then all of that, education, art, music, film, becomes a reason for being loathed, and the creature out of Spiritus Mundi rises up and slouches toward Washington, D.C., to be born.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Golden House

“I don’t want to be elite. Am I elite?” “You need to work on it. You need to become post-factual.” “Is that the same as fictional?” “Fiction’s elite. Nobody believes it. Post-factual is mass market, information-age, troll generated. It’s what people want.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Golden House

“It is hard for a person of no faith like myself to comprehend the moment when faith dies in the human heart. The kneeling believer who suddenly understands that there is no reason to pray because nobody’s listening.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Golden House

“and I began to wonder if we were moral beings at all or simply savages who defined their private bigotries as necessary ethics, as the only ways to be.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Golden House

“Morality came before religion, and religion was our ancestors' way of responding to that built-in need. And if that was so, then it was perfectly possible to lead a good life, to have a strong sense of right and wrong, without ever letting God and his harpies into the room.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Golden House

“The alphabet is where all our secrets begin.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Golden House

“...we often imagined, as we drove, a fictional universe in which Fitzgerald's and Wodehouse's creations might visit one another. Bertie Wooster and Jeeves might have intruded on the rarefied world of the Eggs, silly-ass Bertie stepping into sensible Nick Carraway's shoes, and Reginald Jeeves the fish-eating Spinoza-loving gentleman's gentleman and genius finding a way to give Jay Gatsby the happy-ever-after ending with Daisy Buchanan for which he so profoundly longed.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Golden House

“Construction work was the city’s new brutalist art form, erecting its installations wherever you looked. Tall buildings fell and construction sites rose. Pipes and cables rose from and descended into the hidden depths. Telephone landlines ceased to work and water and power and gas services were randomly suspended. Construction work was the art of making the city become aware of itself as a fragile organism at the mercy of forces against which there was no appeal. Construction work was the mighty metropolis being taught the lessons of vulnerability and helplessness. Construction workers were the grand conceptual artists of our time and their installations, their savage holes in the ground, inspired not only hatred—because most people disliked modern art—but also awe.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Golden House

“This is what I am not: I am not one thing. I contain multitudes.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Golden House

“Say we are from nowhere or anywhere or somewhere, we are make-believe people, frauds, reinventions, shapeshifters, which is to say, Americans.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Golden House

“I was simultaneously exhausted and scared. Maybe I was wrong about my country. Maybe a life lived in the bubble had made me believe things that were not so, or not enough so to carry the day. What did anything mean if the worst happened, if brightness fell from the air, if the lies, the slanders, the ugliness, the ugliness, became the face of America. What would my story mean, my life, my work, the stories of Americans old and new, Mayflower families and Americans proudly sworn in just in time to share in the unmasking—the unmaking—of America. Why even try to understand the human condition if humanity revealed itself as grotesque, dark, not worth it. What was the point of poetry, cinema, art. Let goodness wither on the vine. Let Paradise be lost. The America I loved, gone with the wind.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Golden House

“What is a good life? What is its opposite? These are questions to which no two men will give the same answers. In these our cowardly times, we deny the grandeur of the Universal, and assert and glorify our local Bigotries, and so we cannot agree on much. In these our degenerate times, men bent on nothing but vainglory and personal gain—hollow, bombastic men for whom nothing is off-limits if it advances their petty cause—will claim to be great leaders and benefactors, acting in the common good, and calling all who oppose them liars, envious, little people, stupid people, stiffs, and, in a precise reversal of the truth, dishonest and corrupt. We are so divided, so hostile to one another, so driven by sanctimony and scorn, so lost in cynicism, that we call our pomposity idealism, so disenchanted with our rulers, so willing to jeer at the institutions of our state, that the very word goodness has been emptied of meaning and needs, perhaps, to be set aside for a time, like all the other poisoned words, spirituality, for example, final solution, for example, and (at least when applied to skyscrapers and fried potatoes) freedom.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Golden House

“In the tradtional world, it is known that for the female of the species metamorphosis is easier than for the male. A woman leaves her father's house, sheds his name like an old skin and puts on her husband's name like a wedding dress. Her body changes and becomes capable of containing and then expelling other bodies. ... Maybe a woman's life gains its meaning through such metamophoses, but for a man it is different. The abandonment of the past makes a man meaningless. ... An exile is a hollow man trying to fill up with manhood once again, a phantom in search of lost flesh and bone, a ship in search of an anchor.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Golden House

“Guns were alive in America, and death was their random gift.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Golden House

“Across the Atlantic, in another theatre of the identity wars, the British prime minister was narrowing the definition of Britishness to exclude multiplicity, internationalism, the world as the location of the self. Only little England would do to define the English.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Golden House

“The art of the cinema,’ Truffaut allegedly said, ‘is to point the camera at a beautiful woman.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Golden House

“his way of walking toward closed doors without slowing down, knowing they would open for him;”
― Salman Rushdie, The Golden House

“But a man may dream, and in his dreams be other than he is.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Golden House

“What is heroism in our time? What is villainy? How much we have forgotten, if we don’t know the answer to such questions anymore.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Golden House

“The problem is not technological,” he said. “And there is no technological solution to it. The problem is human, human nature in general, male human nature in particular,”
― Salman Rushdie, The Golden House