Colin Warner

“Saladin had been seized by the melancholy notion that the garden had been a better place before he knew its names, that something had been lost which he would never be able to regain.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“The emperor's job was to present these plastic trays of steaming delicacies to a family of blond people somewhere in the middle of America, and then to bow to them, while off-screen, in the shadows, a gong sounded (and further off-screen, in the mists of history, you could hear the collective weeping of a civilization going back five thousand years).”
― Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown

“How does newness come into the world? How is it born?
Of what fusions, translations, conjoining is it made?
How does it survive, extreme and dangerous as it is? What compromises, what deals, what betrayals of its secret nature must it make to stave off the wrecking crew, the exterminating angel, the guillotine?
Is birth always a fall?
Do angels have wings? Can men fly?”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“There is no hospital in Laxmangarh, although there are three different foundation stones for a hospital, laid by three different politicians before three different elections...
...If I were making a country, I’d get the sewage pipes first, then the democracy, then I’d go about giving pamphlets about statues of Gandhi to other people, but what do I know? I’m just a murderer!”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger