Barbara Adde’s Reviews > The Eleventh Hour: A Quintet of Stories > Status Update

“When I was young I was angry. I would get into loud arguments with friends. Now I’m afraid the anger will be directed at me. Look what I did, the grief I caused people who didn’t deserve it, the attention-seeking vanity of the act, I got to read my own obituaries, which were less lavish than I might have hoped.

“We are the universe. Singly and plurally. We contain the stars.
This helps me.”

“There is no reason why the language of pride must be less than that of poetry. No reason not to be equal. If it takes longer to write the book, so what? If it takes years or your whole life or you die leaving it unfinished, who cares? Nobody’s waiting.”

“It wasn’t just a matter of a cruel king. Satan had taken charge of the human spirit. He saw that wherever he looked.”

“‘Here is the difference between real life and books,’ he said. ‘In books it is necessary to bring things to a satisfying resolution. In real life things are not so neat.”

“He was no longer himself. What he was was unclear. But not himself as he had known himself, as he had believed himself to be. As if the mind, when freed from the body, became alien to itself. As if selfhood resided in the union of flesh and thought.”

“Her hometown was far away. Books were her homeland now.”

“When the Honorary Fellow S.M. Arthur woke up in his darkened College bedroom he was dead, but at first that didn’t seem to change anything.”

Rushdie is as brilliant a storyteller as ever and I hope some day he is still writing from beyond the grave.

“The old move through the world of the young like shades, unseen, of no concern. But the shadows see each other and know who they are.”