Salman Rushdie

The explosion of a jetliner over India triggers an Apocalyptic battle that sweeps across the subcontinent. Reprint.

A Novel

The Satanic Verses

里森

Notice anything unusual? Just two brown men, falling hard, nothing so new about that, you may think; climbed to high, got above themselves, flew too close to the sun, is that it?

Let’s face it: it was impossible for them to have heard one another, much less conversed and also competed thus in song. Accelerating towards the planet, atmosphere roaring around them, how could they? But let’s face this, too: they did.

Movie producers, left in seven lurches, panicked expensively.

Property is so soothing, I do recommend it.’

For a man like Saladin Chamcha the debasing of Englishness by the English was a thing too painful to contemplate.

once they had proved the existence of a single unified force of which electromagnetism, gravity and the strong and weak forces of the new physics were all merely aspects, avatars, one might say, or angels, then what would we have but the oldest thing of all, a supreme entity controlling all creation

What’s a ghost? Unfinished business, is what.

‘Wherever the English settle, they never leave England,’ Dr Babington said as he faded into the moonlight. ‘Unless, like Doña Rosa, they fall in love.’

‘But how do they do it?’ Chamcha wanted to know. ‘They describe us,’ the other whispered solemnly. ‘That’s all. They have the power of description, and we succumb to the pictures they construct.’

That night, he told the manticore and the wolf that he was with them, all the way.

The Satanic Verses quotes

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