When you pray for what you most want in the world, its opposite comes along with it. I was given a woman whom I truly loved and who truly loved me. The opposite side of such a love is the pain of its...
When we stop believing in the gods we can start believing in their stories.
To be born again,' sang Gibreal Farishta tumbling from the heaveans, 'first you have to die. Ho ji! Ho ji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly Tat-taa! Takatun! How to ever smile aga...
There is a thing that lives in us, eating our food, breathing our air, looking out through our eyes, and when it comes out to play nobody is immune; possessed, we turn murderously upon one another, th...
One foreign correspondent came up to be friendly. He asked this man what he should think about what Khomeini had said. How seriously should he take it? Was it just a rhetorical flourish or something g...
If love is a yearning to be like (even to become) the beloved, then hatred, it must be said, can be engendered by the same ambition, when it cannot be fulfilled.
Between shame and shamelessness lies the axis upon which we turn; meteorological conditions at both these poles are of the most extreme, ferocious type. Shamelessness, shame: the roots of violence.
And now, restored to the status of daughter in her own home, Amina began to feel the emotions of other people's food seeping into her - because Reverend Mother doled out the curries and meatballs of i...
After they stopped torturing him they locked him in the jail cell again and pretended they would forget him... Then, eventually, and unexpectedly, release. Into ignominy, oblivion, married life.
After a winter's gestation in its eggshell of ice, the valley had beaked its way out into the open, moist and yellow.
A man who sets out to make himself up is taking on the Creator's role, according to one way of seeing things; he's unnatural, a blasphemer, an abomination of abominations. From another angle, you coul...
A figure of speech is a shifty thing; it can be twisted or it can be straight.
In autobiography, as in all literature, what actually happened is less important than what the author can manage to persuade his audience to believe
Because silence, too, has an echo, hollower and longer-lasting than the reverberations of any sound.
The children of the hour of darkness were born, I’m afraid, in the midst of the age of darkness; so that although we found it easy to be brilliant, we were always confused about being good.
Man is sane only to the extent that he subscribes to a previously-agreed construction of reality.
BOMBAY WAS CENTRAL, had been so from the moment of its creation: the bastard child of a Portuguese-English wedding, and yet the most Indian of Indian cities. In Bombay all Indias met and merged. In Bo...
Proving once again that there was no escape from recurrence.
Радвай се, че не си майка в такива времена – отвърна му тя. – Защото, ако беше, щеше да се радваш, че двамата ти скарани синове отново ще се съберат, но едновременно с това щеше да се изпълниш със стр...
The old are destroying the young by them to die in distant fields, and in response the young are destroying themselves.