Fury Salman Rushdie Quotes & Sayings

Fury ... sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal ... drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths — Salman Rushdie

Life is fury, he'd thought. Fury - sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal - drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths. Out of furia comes creation, inspiration, originality, passion, but also violence, pain, pure unafraid destruction, the giving and receiving of blows from which we never recover. The Furies pursue us; Shiva dances his furious dance to create and also to destroy. But never mind about gods! Sara ranting at him represented the human spirit in its purest, least socialized form. This is what we are, what we civilize ourselves to disguise - the terrifying human animal in us, the exalted, transcendent, self-destructive, untramelled lord of creation. — Salman Rushdie

Otto Cone as a man of seventy-plus years jumped into an open lift shaft and died. Now this was a subject which Alicia Cone, who would readily discuss the most taboo matters refused to touch upon. Why does a survivor of the camps live forty years then complete the job the monsters didn't get done? Does great evil eventually triumph no matter how strenuously it is resisted? Does it leave a sliver of ice in the blood working its way through until it reaches the heart? Or worse, can a man's death be incompatible with his life? Alicia, who's first response on hearing of her father's death had been fury, flung such questions as these at her mother, who stone-faced beneath a broad-brimmed black hat said only, You have inherited his lack of restraint my dear. — Salman Rushdie