salman rushdie-- the moor's last sigh

here's my collection of quotes from The Moor's Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie-- it's a good book, but dense; i'd recommend it, but it takes a while to muddle through.

Suspiro ergo sum. I sigh, therefore I am. The latin as usual tells the truth: suspirare = sub, below, +spirare, verb, to breathe. Suspiro: I under-breathe.
-SR

There's not a star worth following: it's just an unlucky rock. Our fates are here on earth. There are no guiding stars.
-SR

Was weeping such a weakness? he wondered. Was defending-to-the-death such a strength?
-SR

Beauty is destiny of a sort, beauty speaks to beauty, it recognizes and assents, it believes it can excuse everything.
-SR

Did we really love her at all in those days, or was it just her long dominance over us, and our passive acceptance of our enslavement, that we mistook for love?
-SR

Much that was corruptible in me has been corrupted; much that was perfectible, but also capable of being demolished, has been lost.
-SR

I had fallen from grace, and the horror of it shattered the universe, like a mirror. I felt as though I, too, had shattered; as if i were falling to earth, not as myself, but as a thousand and one fragmented images of myself, trapped in shards of glass.
-SR

I tried to see lovelessness as arrogance, for who but the loveless could believe themselves complete, all-seeing, all-wise? To love is to lose omnipotence and omniscience.
-SR

The truth is almost always exceptional, freakish, improbable, and almost never normative, almost never what cold calculations would suggest.
-SR

How easily the human mind 'normalises' the abnormal, with what rapidity the unthinkable becomes not only thinkable but humdrum, not worth thinking about!
-SR

Civilisation is the sleight of hand that conceals our natures from ourselves.
-SR

For the barbarians are not only at our gates but within our skins.
-SR

The best, and worst, were in us, and fought in us, as they had fought in the land at large. In some of us, the worst triumphed; but still we could say-- and say truthfully-- that we had loved the best.
-SR

How to forgive the world for its beauty, which merely disguises its ugliness; for its gentleness, which merely cloaks its cruelty; for its illusion of continuing, seamlessly, as night follows the day, so to speak-- whereas in reality life is a series of brutal ruptures, falling upon our defenceless heads like the blows of a woodsman's axe?
-SR

Defeated love is still a treasure, and those who choose lovelessness have won no victory at all.
-SR

The past and future are where we spend most of our lives. In fact, what you are going through in this small microcosmos of ours is the disorienting feeling of having slipped for a few hours into the present.
-SR

He was caught in a shrieking feedback loop of remembrances, a screaming of memories, whose note rose higher and higher, until it began to shatter things. Eardrums; glass; lives.
-SR

(and my favorite:)

But after a not-so-long (though gaudily colourful) life I am fresh out of theses. Life itself being crucifixion enough.
-Salman Rushdie