Quotes from ‘Shame'

By Salman Rushdie

• “Gossip is like a water. It probes surfaces for their weak places, until it finds the breakthrough point”.
• “Trouble in a marriage is like monsoon water accumulating on flat roof. You don’t realize it’s up there, but it gets heavier & heavier until one day, with a great crash, the whole roof falls in on your head”.
• What is the most powerful impulse of Human beings in the face of night, of danger, of the unknown?

It is to run away; to avert the eyes and flee; to pretend the menace is not loping toward them in seven league boots. It is the will to ignorance, the iron folly with which we excise from consciousness whatever consciousness cannot bear. No need to invoke the ostrich to give this impulse symbolic form; humanity is more wilfully blind than any flightless bird.”

• “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. — At any rate.”
• Repression is a seamless garment; a society which is authoritarian in its social & sexual codes, which crushes it’s women beneath the intolerable burdens of honour & prosperity, breeds repression of other kinds as well.
• “What is a saint? A saint is a person who suffers in our stead.”
• “Give people democracy and look what they do with it.”
• “Love is an emotion that recognizes itself in others.”
• “If a great man touches you, you age too quickly, you live to much and are used up.”
• “Some men are so great that can be unmade only by themselves.”

Wordings by characters

• “He tore me in half long ago.”
• “Life is shit.”

- Arjumand Harappa

• “ I hate fish”.

-Sufiya Zinobiya

• “The sight of you through my beloved telescope gave me the strength to break my mother’s powers.”

- Omar Khayyam Shakil

• There is a saying that the frog who croaks in the shaft of a well will be frightened by the booming voice of the giant frog who answers him.

• From ‘The Suicide’, a play by the Russian writer Nikolai Erdman: ‘Only the dead can say what the living are thinking.’