Victory City
Salman Rushdie
Top 10 Best Quotes
“I, Pampa Kampana, am the author of this book. I have lived to see an empire rise and fall. How are they remembered now, these kings, these queens? They exist now only in words. While they lived, they were victors, or vanquished, or both. Now they are neither. Words are the only victors. What they did, or thought, or felt, no longer exists. Only these words describing those things remain. They will be remembered in the way I have chosen to remember them. Their deeds will only be known in the way they have been set down. They will mean what I wish them to mean. I myself am nothing now. All that remains is this city of words. Words are the only victors.”
“Fictions could be as powerful as histories, revealing the new people to themselves, allowing them to understand their own natures and the natures of those around them, and making them real.”
“men and women and members of the genders beyond and in between,”
“Will you love me when I get sick and start to fail, to descend, as is inevitable, toward death?” he said. “Do you really want to nurse a dying man and have to grieve for all the love you wasted on him?” “Love is never a waste,” she said.”
“When people start talking about a golden age,” he said, “they always think a new world has begun which will last forever. But the truth about these so-called golden ages is that they never last very long. A few years, maybe. There’s always trouble ahead.”
“Water creates love more easily than victory.”
“This is how history moves; the obsession of one moment is relegated to the junkyard of oblivion by the next.”
“The medical equipment, the surgeons and nurses, the fearsome saws used for cutting off limbs, the canisters of salve for blinded eyes, the leeches, the healing herbs, would all be placed at the rear of the column. No soldier going to war wanted to see such things. It was necessary for them to feel immortal, or, at least, to persuade themselves that crippling injury, agonizing wounds, and death were things that happened to other people. It was important that each individual foot soldier and cavalryman was allowed to believe that they personally would emerge from combat unscathed.”
“On this day Bisnaga moves out of the realm of the fantastic into that of the historical, and the great river of its story flows into the ocean of stories which is the history of the world.”
“In death do triumph and failure humbly meet. We learn far less from victory than from defeat.”
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Book Keywords:
defeat, triumph, death, victory
