“unbendingness can also be monomania … it can be tyranny, and also it can be brittle, whereas what is flexible can also be humane, and strong enough to last.”
“Maybe, after all, love was more durable than hate; even if love changed, some shadow of it, some lasting shape, persisted.”
“If love is a yearning to be like (even to become) the beloved, then hatred, it must be said, can be engendered by the same ambition, when it cannot be fulfilled.”
“A book is a product of a pact with the Devil that inverts the Faustian contract, he’d told Allie. Dr. Faustus sacrificed eternity in return for two dozen years of power; the writer agrees to the ruination of his life, and gains (but only if he’s lucky) maybe not eternity, but posterity, at least.”
“Maybe unhappiness is the continuum through which a human life moves, and joy just a series of blips, of islands in the stream. Or if not unhappiness, then at least melancholy …”
“Gibreel Farishta floating on his cloud formed the opinion that the moral fuzziness of the English was meteorologically induced. ‘When the day is not warmer than the night,’ he reasoned, ‘when the light is not brighter than the dark, when the land is not drier than the sea, then clearly a people will lose the power to make distinctions, and commence to see everything – from political parties to sexual partners to religious beliefs – as much-the-same, nothing-to-choose, give-or-take. What folly! For truth is extreme, it is so and not thus, it is him and not her; a partisan matter, not a spectator sport. It is, in brief, heated.’”
‘“This notion of separation of functions, light versus dark, evil versus good, may be straightforward enough in Islam — O, children of Adam, let not the Devil seduce you, as he expelled your parents from the garden, pulling off from them their clothing that he might show them their shame — but go back a bit and you see that it’s a pretty recent fabrication. Amos, eighth century BC, asks: ‘Shall there be evil in a city and the Lord hath not done it?’ Also Jahweh, quoted by Deutero-Isaiah two hundred years later, remarks: ‘I form the light, and create darkness; I make peace a create evil; I the Lord do all these things.’ It isn’t until the Book of Chronicles, merely fourth century BC, that the word shaitan is used to mean a being, and not only an attribute of God.”’
“O God most beneficent most merciful, be with me in this my time of need, my most grievous need. Then it occurred to him that he was being punished, and for a time that made it possible to suffer the pain, but after a time he got angry. Enough, God, his unspoken words demanded, why must I die when I have not killed, are you vengeance or are you love? The anger with God carried him through another day, but then it faded, and in its place there came a terrible emptiness, an isolation, as he realized he was talking to thin air, that there was nobody there at all, and then he felt more foolish than ever in his life, and he began to plead into the emptiness, ya Allah, just be there, damn it, just be. But he felt nothing, nothing nothing, and then one day he found that he no longer needed there to be anything to feel.”
The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie – Some Favourites
Leave a reply
a cheery wave from a stranded youngster 