Salman Rushdie Quotes

Not at all similar are the race of the immortal gods and the race of men who walk upon the earth.

No thanks," said Digory, "I don't know that I care much about living on and on after everyone I know is dead. I'd rather live an ordinary time and die and go to Heaven.

You come into this world as you leave it, on your own. It's made me want to live a life slightly less ordinary.

When the gods were more manlike, Men were more godlike.

I still don't understand what a sea god would be doing in Atlanta." Leo snorted. "What's a wine god doing in Kansas? Gods are weird.

The gods retain their threefold task: they must exorcize the terrors of nature, they must reconcile men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death, and they must compensate them for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on them.

God is still in the business of coming down to earth: to this cubicle, this email, this room, this house, this job, this hospital room, this car, this bed, this vacation. Any place can become Bethel, the house of God. Cleveland, maybe. Or the chair you're sitting in as you read these words.

You can find the sacred in the most ordinary of things.

The ordinary is the divine.

That is the gods' work, spinning threads of death through the lives of mortal men, an all to make a song for those to come.

An old art spreading rumours about / Paradise, it begs outside the gates / Of the gods: the active gods come out.

Without monsters and gods, art cannot enact a drama.

They tell you that a tree is only a combination of chemical elements. I prefer to believe that God created it, and that it is inhabited by a nymph.

The gods attend to great matters, they neglect small ones.

The impression that you are a demigod worried me. I wanted to be like an ordinary human being with virtues and vices.

I have not the hope of being immortal, because the desire of it has not given me that vanity.

God created the world, but it is the devil who keeps it going.

I grow aware of various forms of man and of myself. I am form and I am formless, I am life and I am matter, mortal and immortal. I am one and many -- myself and humanity in flux.

the brut first knows death when it dies, but man draws consciously nearer to it every hour that he lives; and this makes his life at times a questionable good even to him who has not recognised this character of constant anaihilation in the whole of life.

A person's life from infancy to old age is nothing else than an advance from the world towards heaven, the last stage of which is death; the actual transition from one life to the next.

We mortals with immortal minds are only born for sufferings and joys, and one could almost say that the most excellent receive joy through sufferings.

Heaven walks among us ordinarily muffled in such triple or tenfold disguises that the wisest are deceived and no one suspects the days to be gods.

Words like 'God' and 'Allah' must go the way of 'Apollo' and 'Baal' or they will unmake our world.

When we leave this world, and are laid in the earth, the prince walks as narrow a path as the day-laborer.

Life is nothing unless death has been faced down.