The Satanic Verses Quotes
English novels, Criticism of Islam, Magic realism novels
Top Quotes
“No, not death: birth.”
“Why speak if you can't manage perfect thoughts, perfect sentences?”
“"Martyrdom is a privilege," she said softly. "We shall be like stars; like the sun."”
“A life illuminated by a strangely radiant death, which continued to glow in his minds eye.”
“"To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first you have to die."”
“But after a long instant, he [the Prophet] nods. "You have Submitted. And are welcome in my tents."”
“Wikipedia: The Satanic Verses”
“
Question: What is the opposite of faith?
Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself a kind of belief.
Doubt.
”
“A poet's work … to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.”
“Mahound shakes his head. "Your blasphemy, Salman, can't be forgiven. Did you think I wouldn't work it out? To set your words against the Words of God."”
“And the Prophet said, "Now we may come into Jahilia," and they arose and came into the city, and possessed it in the Name of the Most High, the Destroyer of Men.”
“But names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit.”
“I think the man who wanted to kill Rushdie for writing Satanic Verses hasn't read Satanic verses. I think the Islamists who want to kill me for writing books have not read any of my books.”
“The Press Council condemned the pre-publication of some excerpts as "an aberration from the path of ethical rectitude."”
“Information got abolished sometime in the twentieth century … Since then we've been living in a fairy-story. … Everything happens by magic. Us fairies haven't a fucking notion what's going on.”
“When the Japanese Rushdie translator was killed (summer 1991), spokesmen of the Japanese Muslim community said: "Whoever has killed him, whether Muslim or non-Muslim, at any rate it was his deserved punishment ordained by Allah."”
“Do we realise how that hastily-ordered ban has changed India forever? .... When the Government promptly submitted to this illiterate hysteria, it convinced [Hindus] that secularism had become a code phrase for Muslim appeasement.”
“The history of life was not the bumbling progress – the very English, middle-class progress – Victorian thought had wanted it to be, but violent, a thing of dramatic, cumulative transformations: in the old formulation, more revolution than evolution.”
“One of the reasons for Islamophobia; in 1989 this book was published maligning, ridiculing our Prophet (PBUH). The west could not understand what was the problem. They don’t look at religion the way that we do. And so; in their eyes Islam was an intolerant religion. It became a watershed.”
“The Ayodhya dispute and the Rushdie affair are indeed connected. The ban on The Satanic Verses was part of a package of concessions by the Rajiv Gandhi Government to calm down Syed Shahabuddin, who had threatened a Muslim "march on Ayodhya on the same day when the VHP would hold a rally there.”