Author: Rushdie, Salman
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The aircraft cracked in half, a seed-pod giving up its spores, an egg yielding its mystery.
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See, there, at the Willingdon Club golf links – only nine holes nowadays, skyscrapers having sprouted out of the other nine like giant weeds,
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Pimple’s soliloquy climaxed in such a torrent of obscenities that the beedi-smokers sat up for the first time and commenced animatedly to compare Pimple’s vocabulary with that of the infamous bandit queen Phoolan Devi whose oaths could melt rifle barrels and turn journalists’ pencils to rubber in a trice.
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In that metropolis of tongues and whispers, not even the sharpest ears heard anything reliable.
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Mostly, however, his religious faith was a low-key thing, a part of him that required no more special attention than any other.
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She spared him nothing, accusing him of being a creature of surfaces, like a movie screen, and then she went ahead and forgave him anyway and allowed him to unhook her blouse.
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He was filming at Kanya Kumari, standing on the very tip of Asia, taking part in a fight scene set at the point on Cape Comorin where it seems that three oceans are truly smashing into one another.
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On that day of metamorphosis the illness changed and his recovery began.
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Once the flight to London had taken off, thanks to his magic trick of crossing two pairs of fingers on each hand and rotating his thumbs, the narrow, fortyish fellow who sat in a nonsmoking window seat watching the city of his birth fall away from him like old snakeskin allowed a relieved expression to pass briefly across his face.
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After all, ‘les acteurs ne sont pas des gens’, as the great ham Frederick had explained in Les Enfants du Paradis.
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Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.
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he grew increasingly impatient of that Bombay of dust, vulgarity, policemen in shorts, transvestites, movie fanzines, pavement sleepers and the rumoured singing whores of Grant Road who had begun as devotees of the Yellamma cult in Karnataka but ended up here as dancers in the more prosaic temples of the flesh.
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Christian girls giggled in frocks, men with furled umbrellas stood silent and fixed upon the blue horizon.
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Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles.
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How far did they fly? Five and a half thousand as the crow. Or: from Indianness to Englishness, an immeasurable distance.
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The distance between cities is always small; a villager, travelling a hundred miles to town, traverses emptier, darker,
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space.
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The distance between cities is always small; a villager, travelling a hundred miles to town, traverses emptier,
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The distance between cities is always small; a villager, travelling a hundred miles to town, traverses emptier, darker, more terrifying space.
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January, 1961. A year you could turn upside down and it would still, unlike your watch, tell the same time.
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like the disciple of the philosopher-king Chanakya who asked the great man what he meant by saying one could live in the world and also not live in it, and who was told to carry a brim-full pitcher of water through a holiday crowd without spilling a drop, on pain of death, so that when he returned he was unable to describe the day’s festivities, having been like a blind man, seeing only the jug on his head.
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William the Conqueror, it is said, began by eating a mouthful of English sand.
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‘Tell your son,’ Changez boomed at Nasreen, ‘that if he went abroad to learn contempt for his own kind, then his own kind can feel nothing but scorn for him.
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whose violence was of the type that exists only between fathers and sons, and which differs from that between daughters and mothers in that there lurks behind it the possibility of actual, jaw-breaking fisticuffs.
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A man who sets out to make himself up is taking on the Creator’s role, according to one way of seeing things;
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A man who invents himself needs someone
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A man who invents himself needs someone to believe in him, to prove he’s managed it.
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your Angrez accent wrapped around you like a flag, and don’t think it’s so perfect,
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your Angrez accent wrapped around you like a flag, and don’t think it’s so perfect, it slips, baba, like a false moustache.’
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In Zeeny’s beaten-up Hindustan, a car built for a servant culture, the back seat better upholstered than the
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In Zeeny’s beaten-up Hindustan, a car built for a servant culture, the back seat better upholstered than the front, he felt the night closing in on him like a crowd.
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dark rum was consumed at aluminium tables
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I put down roots in the women I love.
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I begin to suspect that Indians lack the necessary moral refinement for a true sense of tragedy, and therefore cannot really understand the idea of shame.’
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Should the inflight movie be thought of as a particularly vile, random mutation of the form, one that would eventually be extinguished by natural selection, or were they the future of the cinema?
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she slices the air with her hand, rascal has been putting Muslim meat compartments into Hindu non-veg tiffin-carriers,
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lote-tree of the uttermost end that stands beneath the Throne, Shaitan missing, plummeting, splat. But he lived on,
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Question: What is the opposite of faith? Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself a kind of belief. Doubt.
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These people are a mere three or four generations removed from their nomadic past, when they were as rootless as the dunes, or rather rooted in the knowledge that the journeying itself was home.
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the migrant can do without the journey altogether; it’s no more than a necessary evil; the point is to arrive.