Nishit > Nishit's Quotes

“Our human tragedy is that we are unable to comprehend our experience, it slips through our fingers, we can't hold on to it, and the more time passes, the harder it gets...My father said that the natural world gave us explanations to compensate for the meanings we could not grasp. The slant of the cold sunlight on a winter pine, the music of water, an oar cutting the lake and the flight of birds, the mountains' nobility , the silence of the silence. We are given life but must accept that it is unattainable and rejoice in what can be held in the eye, the memory, the mind.”
― Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown

“India's head ached. Insomnia was still her most attentive, cruelest lover, demanding and possessing her selfishly whenever it chose to do so. Light-heartedness was beyond her today. A man of middling quality was trying to marry her, and there was something wrong with her father's voice on the phone.”
― Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown

“- Радвай се, че не си майка в такива времена – отвърна му тя. – Защото, ако беше, щеше да се радваш, че двамата ти скарани синове отново ще се съберат, но едновременно с това щеше да се изпълниш със страх, че и двете ти деца вероятно ще са мъртви. Противоречието на това щастие и този ужас би ти се сторило непоносимо.
- Радвай се, че не си мъж – каза в отговор той. – Защото, щом престанем да спим, виждаме, че на този свят до нас има единствено врагове – врагове, които се преструват, че ни защитават, които стоят, направени от оръжия и облекла в цвят каки, и алчност, и смърт, а зад тях са враговете, които се преструват, че ни спасяват в името на собствения ни Бог, само че и те също са изтъкани от смърт и алчност, а пък зад тях са враговете, живеещи сред нас, носещи безбожни имена, които ни прелъстяват и после ни предават, врагове, за които смъртта е прекалено меко наказание, а още по-отзад са враговете, които никога не виждаме, те дърпат конците на живота ни. Този последен враг, невидимият враг в невидимата стая в чуждата страна, някъде много далеч: пред него искам да се изправя, и ако се наложи да си проправя пътя през всички останали, за да се добера до него, тогава така и ще сторя.”
― Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown

“I am your handiwork made flesh. You took beauty and created hideousness, and out of this monstrosity your child will be born …. I am the meaning of your deeds. I am the meaning of your so-called love; your destructive, selfish, wanton love … your love looks just like hatred.”
― Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown

“Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another's, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.”
― Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown

“The word 'translation' comes, etymologically, from the Latin for 'bearing across'. Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately to the notion that something can also be gained.”
― Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991

“Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old fillms, 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.”
― Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991

“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.”
― Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991

“Half-Christian, half-Jewish, a ‘cathjew nut’,”
― Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir

“By the end of the Latin lesson he was a hard-line atheist, and to prove it, he marched determinedly into the school tuckshop during break and bought himself a ham sandwich. The flesh of the swine passed his lips for the first time that day, and the failure of the Almighty to strike him dead with a thunderbolt proved to him what he had long suspected: that there was nobody up there with thunderbolts to hurl.”
― Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir

“Literature’s view of human nature encouraged understanding, sympathy, and identification with people not like oneself, but the world was pushing everyone in the opposite direction, toward narrowness,”
― Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir

“The lessons one learns at school are not always the ones the school thinks it’s teaching.”
― Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir

“there were three bad mistakes you could make, but if you made only two of the three you could be forgiven. The mistakes were: to be foreign; to be clever; and to be bad at games.”
― Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir

“Youth was often wretched, the struggle to become themselves tore the young to shreds, but sometimes, after the struggle, better days began.”
― Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir

“At the beginning of their work together Arthur Hibbert gave him a piece of advice he never forgot. “You must never write history,” Hibbert said, “until you can hear the people speak.” He thought about that for years, and in the end it came to feel like a valuable guiding principle for fiction as well. If you didn’t have a sense of how people spoke, you didn’t know them well enough, and so you couldn’t—you shouldn’t—tell their story.”
― Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir

“Thus, though I dislike to differ with such a great man, Voltaire was simply ludicrous when he said that if god did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. The human invention of god is the problem to begin with.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation—is that good for the world?”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the 'transcendent' and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don't be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian

“Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian

“We keep on being told that religion, whatever its imperfections, at least instills morality. On every side, there is conclusive evidence that the contrary is the case and that faith causes people to be more mean, more selfish, and perhaps above all, more stupid.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“What do you most value in your friends?
Their continued existence.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“I suppose that one reason I have always detested religion is its sly tendency to insinuate the idea that the universe is designed with 'you' in mind or, even worse, that there is a divine plan into which one fits whether one knows it or not. This kind of modesty is too arrogant for me.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely soley upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him will believeth in anything. - Hitchens 3:16”
― Christopher Hitchens

“The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“My own opinion is enough for me, and I claim the right to have it defended against any consensus, any majority, anywhere, any place, any time. And anyone who disagrees with this can pick a number, get in line, and kiss my ass.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything