Salman Rushdie Quotes

“Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison.”

“I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I'm gone which would not have happened if I had not come.”

“I learned the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time.”

“Memory's truth, because 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 our lives takes place in our absence.”

“No people whose word for 'yesterday' is the same as their word for 'tomorrow' can be said to have a firm grip on the time.”

“Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems – but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.”

“To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.”

“We all owe death a life.”

“What can't be cured must be endured.”

“What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same.”