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Book: Shame
Quotes of Book: Shame
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  1. Salman Rushdie _ Shame

    From 'The Suicide', a play by the Russian writer Nikolai Erdman: 'Only the dead can say what the living are thinking.
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  2. Salman Rushdie _ Shame

    Human beings have a remarkable talent for persuading themselves of the authenticity and nobility of aspects of themselves which are in fact expedient, spurious, base.
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  3. Salman Rushdie _ Shame

    We know the force of gravity, but not its origins; and to explain why we become attached to our birthplaces we pretend that we are trees and speak of roots. Look under your feet. You will not find gnarled growths sprouting through the soles. Roots, I sometimes think, are a conservative myth, designed to keep us in our places.
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  4. Salman Rushdie _ Shame

    {...} every story one chooses to tell is a kind of censorship, it prevents the telling of other tales {...}
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  5. Salman Rushdie _ Shame

    So-called Islamic 'fundamentalism' does not spring, in Pakistan, from the people. It is imposed on them from above. Autocratic regimes find it useful to espouse the rhetoric of faith, because people respect that language, are reluctant to oppose it. This how religions shore up dictators; by encircling them with words of power, words which the people are reluctant to see discredited, disenfranchised, mocked.But the ramming-down-the-throat point stands. In the end you get sick of it, you lose faith in the faith, if not qua faith then certainly as basis for a state. And then the dictator falls, and it is discovered that he had brought God down with him, that the justifying myth of the nation has been unmade. This leaves only two options: disintegration, or a new dictatorship ... no, there is a third, and I shall not be o pessimistic as to deny its possibility. The third option is the substitution of a new myth for the old one. Here are three such myths, all available from stock at short notice: liberty; equality; fraternity. I recommend them highly.
    book-quoterevolutionislam

  6. Salman Rushdie _ Shame

    History is natural selection. Mutant versions of the past struggle for dominance; new species of fact arise,and old, saurian truths go to the wall, blindfolded and smoking last cigarettes. Only the mutations of the strong survive. The weak, the anonymous, the defeated leave few marks: field-patterns, axe-heads, folk-tales, broken pitchers, burial mounds, the fading memory of their youthful beauty. History loves only those who dominate her: it is a relationship of mutual enslavement.
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  7. Salman Rushdie _ Shame

    Is history to be considered the property of the participants only?
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  8. Salman Rushdie _ Shame

    Roots, I sometimes think, are a conservative myth, designed to keep us in our places.
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  9. Salman Rushdie _ Shame

    But shame is like everything else; live with it for long enough and it becomes part of the furniture."
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  10. Salman Rushdie _ Shame

    Repression is a seamless garment; a society which is authoritarian in its social and sexual codes, which crushes its women beneath the intolerable burdens of honour and propriety, breeds repressions of other kinds as well.
    book-quotewomenmysogynyrepression

  11. Salman Rushdie _ Shame

    A man who catches History's eye is thereafter bound to a mistress from whom he will never escape.
    book-quotehistory

  12. Salman Rushdie _ Shame

    All migrants leave their pasts behind, although some try to pack it into bundles and boxes-but on the journey something seeps out of the treasured mementoes and old photographs, until even their owners fail to recognize them, because it is the fate of migrants to be stripped of history, to stand naked amidst the scorn of strangers upon whom they see rich clothing, the brocades of continuity and the eyebrows of belonging..
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