Great Throughts Treasury

"If I do have a kind of moral view of the world, which I suppose I do, I should come clean and admit that I do, it's trying to construct for myself, a sense of the spiritual life of human beings which doesn't rely on outside validation. Which doesn't rely on some moral absolute like a god or a devil or a holy book. But which tries to create -- what I'm trying to do for myself is work out a set of spiritual values and a way of thinking about the spiritual life of people which is internal. Which says that we all have that inside us, you don't need to go outside to look for the divine. Nor for the demonic."

"If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now."

"If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it."

"I want more than what I want."

"If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you're dumb and blind."

"In spite of all evidence that life is discontinuous, a valley of rifts, and that random chance plays a great part in our fates, we go on believing in the continuity of things, in causation and meaning. But we live on a broken mirror, and fresh cracks appear in its surface every day."

"In the place from which I began, after all, I watched the film from the child's - Dorothy's point of view. I experienced, with her, the frustration of being brushed aside by Uncle Henry and Auntie Em, busy with their dull grown-up counting. Like all adults, they couldn't focus on what was really important to Dorothy: namely, the threat to Toto. I ran away with Dorothy and then ran back. Even the shock of discovering that the Wizard was a humbug was a shock I felt as a child, a shock to the child's faith in adults. Perhaps, too, I felt something deeper, something I couldn't articulate; perhaps some half-formed suspicion about grown-ups was being confirmed."

"Is birth always a fall?"

"Is that a threat?"

"It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it."

"Islam doesn't have to mean blind faith. It can mean what it always meant in your family, a culture, a civilization, as open-minded as your grandfather was, as delightedly disputatious as your father was.... Don't let the zealots make Muslim a terrifying word, I urged myself; remember when it meant family."

"In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss."

"It is high time, for starters, that Muslims were able to study the revelation of their religion as an event inside history, not supernaturally above it,"

"It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish ... to do otherwise is to legitimize it."

"It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity."

"It was because it was easier to blame me, ... You know, 'Why is he rocking the boat?' In those days there was a lot of that stuff. He was asking for it. He did it on purpose. He was begging for it. It was just conventional blaming-the-victim stuff. I don't like the term 'victim' when applied to myself. Certainly I felt the guilt burden had shifted from the people doing the violence to the person on the receiving end of the violence."

"It's fun to read things when you don't know all the words. Even children love it."

"It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity. Which seems to be self-evidently true; but I suggest that the writer who is out-of-country and even out-of-language may experience this loss in an intensified form. It is made more concrete for him by the physical fact of discontinuity, of his present being in a different place from his past, of his being elsewhere… human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capably only of fractured perceptions. Partial beings, in all the senses of that phrase. Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because of our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to the death."

"It’s fun to read things when you don't know all the words. Even children love it. One of the things any great children’s writer will tell you is that children like it if in books designed for their age group there is a vocabulary just slightly bigger than theirs.So they come up against weird words, and the weird words excite them. If you describe a small girl in a story as loquacious, it works so much better than talkative. And then some little girl will read the book and her sister will be shooting her mouth off and she will say to her sister, Don't be so loquacious. It is a whole new weapon in her arsenal."

"It's still open season on writers,"

"I've been gradually reclaiming all kinds of freedoms over these years..,"

"Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true."

"I've been worrying about God a little bit lately. It seems as if he's been lashing out, you know, destroying cities, annihilating places. It seems like he's been in a bad mood. And I think it has to do with the quality of lovers he's been getting. If you look at the people who love God now, you know, if I was God, I'd need to destroy something."

"I've tried to live without fear. Fear paralyzes you. I've tried to get on with my life."

"Life is fury, he'd thought. Fury — sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal — drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths. Out of furia comes creation, inspiration, originality, passion, but also violence, pain, pure unafraid destruction, the giving and receiving of blows from which we never recover. The Furies pursue us; Shiva dances his furious dance to create and also to destroy. But never mind about gods! Sara ranting at him represented the human spirit in its purest, least socialized form. This is what we are, what we civilize ourselves to disguise — the terrifying human animal in us, the exalted, transcendent, self-destructive, untrammeled lord of creation."

"Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way."

"Life is elsewhere. Cross frontiers. Fly away."

"Live on, survive, for the earth gives forth wonders. It may swallow your heart, but the wonders keep on coming. You stand before them bareheaded, shriven. What is expected of you is attention."

"Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination of the heart."

"Many traditional Muslims lead lives apart, inward-turned lives of near-segregation from the wider population."

"Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to death."

"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."

"Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull."

"Meanwhile, it seems, the world is suffering from compassion fatigue,"

"Memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own."

"Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence."

"Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit."

"Music, love, death. Certainly a triangle of sorts; maybe even an eternal one."

"Never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things — childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves — that go on slipping, like sand, through our fingers."

"Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself is a kind of belief."

"Not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite; our hopes spill over its rim."

"Nothing really improves us. Whatever improves one person will disimprove another. Some people are paralyzed by the consciousness of death, other people live with it. … The fatwa certainly made me think about it a lot more than I ever had. I guess I know I'm going to die, but then, so are you. And one of the things that I thought a lot about at the time of the fatwa and ever since is that quite a few of the people I really care about died during this period, all about the same age as I am, and they were not under a death sentence. They just died, of lung cancer, AIDS, whatever. It occurred to me that you don't need a fatwa, it can happen anytime."

"Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith."

"Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what."

"Nothing comes from nothing, Thief let; no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old--it is the new combinations that make them new."

"Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always carried about is rather more vulnerable."

"Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made?"

"Now, as I look at the movie again, I have become the fallible adult. Now I am a member of the tribe of imperfect parents who cannot listen to their children's voices. I, who no longer have a father, have become a father instead, and now it is my fate to be unable to satisfy the longings of a child. This is the last and most terrible lesson of the film: that there is one final, unexpected rite of passage. In the end, ceasing to be children, we all become magicians without magic, exposed conjurers, with only our simply humanity to get us through."

"One of the strange things that happens when you publish a book is that you begin ... to see what resonances it has for the readers, ... Sometimes you begin to understand your book a bit more."

"One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable."