Salman Rushdie Quotes

It was a strange lightness, a drifting feeling. Zero gravity. I understood that everything that once seemed solid and immovable might just float away. And that this was a truth of life, not an illusion in the grieving mind of a child. Everything that is hard and heavy in your world is made up of billions of molecules in constant motion offering the illusion of permanence. But it all tends toward breaking down and falling away. Some things just go more quickly, more surprisingly, than others.

All forms of human happiness contain within themselves the seeds of their own decomposition.

My experiments proved that the radiation of uranium compounds can be measured with precision under determined conditions and that this radiation is an atomic property of the element of uranium.

She would never change, but one day at the touch of a fingertip she would fall to dust.

Everything that comes together falls apart.

What falls away is always. And is near.

Everything that comes together falls apart. Everything. The chair I’m sitting on. It was built, and so it will fall apart. I’m gonna fall apart, probably before this chair. And you’re gonna fall apart. The cells and organs and systems that make you you—they came together, grew together, and so must fall apart. The Buddha knew one thing science didn’t prove for millennia after his death: Entropy increases. Things fall apart.

Yossarian was cold, too, and shivering uncontrollably. He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all. I'm cold,' Snowden said. 'I'm cold.

History fades into fable; fact becomes clouded with doubt and controversy; the inscription molders from the tablet: the statue falls from the pedestal. Columns, arches, pyramids, what are they but heaps of sand; and their epitaphs, but characters written in the dust?

The human body is in constant change the minute we're born. It's in a constant state of decay. We're all like Ford Escorts, just falling apart.

You can't be young always. The day will come when everything will fall apart.

And too soon Marred are those so early Made.

In man's life, time is but a moment; being, a flux; sense is dim; the material frame corruptible; soul, an eddy of breath; fortune a thing inscrutable, and fame precarious.

Things fall apart, it's scientific.

But relying on one person for your every need is so dangerous. One set of hands isn't enough to keep you from falling.

Love is easily killed.

When men once reach their autumn, sickly joys fall off apace, as yellow leaves from trees

Things were somehow so good that they were in danger of becoming very bad because what is fully mature is very close to rotting

It's quite sad to see how many people I've known over that years that just die off, you know like wilted flowers. Well, there's something to be said for flowers in the dustbin.

Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window, and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all.

Who shall dare to talk of strength when David can fall?

For all that we have done, as a civilization, as individuals, the universe is not stable, and nor is any single thing within it. Stars consume themselves, the universe itself rushes apart, and we ourselves are composed of matter in constant flux. Colonies of cells in temporary alliance, replicating and decaying and housed within, an incandescent cloud of electrical impulse and precariously stacked carbon code memory. This is reality, this is self knowledge, and the perception of it will, of course, make you dizzy.

When the forces that hold it together go away, the body must fall.