Salman Rushdie Quotes

What goes by the name of love is banishment, with now and then a postcard from the homeland, such is my considered opinion, this evening.

You are so close, and I can’t reach you.

They had stopped now and he gave a glance up at the sky, through the trees, as though to see how much time was left. Amber, watching him, was suddenly struck with panic. Now he was going--out again into that great world with its bustle and noise and excitement--and she must stay here. She had a terrible new feeling of loneliness, as if she stood in some solitary corner at a party where she was the only stranger. Those places he had seen, she would never see; those fine things he had done, she would never do. But worst of all she would never see him again.

I thought that we were getting somewhere, but we're still nowhere at all. I watch your tail lights fading, I try but a tear won't fall.

I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of.

Love may have the longest arms, but it can still fall short of an embrace.

I love no one but you, I have discovered, but you are far away and I am here alone.

Written kisses don't reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts.

Seek and Hide: the Lover gazes at the Beloved. The Beloved looks away. The Beloved turns and looks at the Lover. The Lover runs away.

Between the desire And the spasm, Between the potency And the existence, Between the essence And the descent, Falls the Shadow.

It's the ones who resist that we most want to kiss, wouldn't you say?

They were always like two people talking to each other in different languages. But she loved him so much, when he withdrew as he had now done, it was like the warm sun going down and leaving her in chilly twilight dews.

Now we're like planets, holding to each other from a great distance. [...] Now we're hundreds of miles apart, our short arms keep us lonely, no one hears what's in my head. [...] It's March, even the birds don't know what to do with themselves.

You never come back, not all the way. Always there is an odd distance between you and the people you love and the people you meet, a barrier thin as the glass of a mirror, you never come all the way out of the mirror; you stand, for the rest of your life, with one foot in this world and no one in another, where everything is upside down and backward and sad.

Yet nothing can to nothing fall, Nor any place be empty quite; Therefore I think my breast hath all Those pieces still, though they be not unite; And now, as broken glasses show A hundred lesser faces, so My rags of heart can like, wish, and adore, But after one such love, can love no more.

Each of them always gravitating toward the other. Yet still they do not touch.

There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room. It's like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction--every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and excitement at about a million miles an hour.

She was sleeping in a quiet bedroom beside her brother, separated only by glass and sand from the young man she loved, a young man who loved her back

Part of me aches at the thought of her being so close yet so untouchable.

Sonnet XXV Before I loved you, love, nothing was my own: I wavered through the streets, among Objects: Nothing mattered or had a name: The world was made of air, which waited. I knew rooms full of ashes, Tunnels where the moon lived, Rough warehouses that growled 'get lost', Questions that insisted in the sand. Everything was empty, dead, mute, Fallen abandoned, and decayed: Inconceivably alien, it all Belonged to someone else - to no one: Till your beauty and your poverty Filled the autumn plentiful with gifts.

I love you. And I want you, too. But. However. Unfortunately...

I love no one but you, I have discovered, but you are far away and I am here alone. Then this is my life and maybe, however unlikely, I'll find my way back there. Or maybe, one day, I'll settle for second best. And on that same day, hell will freeze over, the sun will burn out and the stars will fall from the sky.

He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.

When You Weren't Looking ...why. ...Can't you ...care ...more ...about ...me.

He turns and walks away, moving so quickly that the candle flames shiver with the motion of the air. “I miss you,” Isobel says as he leaves, but the sentiment is crushed by the clatter of the beaded curtain falling closed behind him.