Alone, [Chamcha] all at once remembered that he and Pamela had once disagreed, as they disagreed on everything, on a short-story they’d both read, whose theme was precisely the nature of the unforgivable. Title and author eluded him, but the story came back vividly. A man and a woman had been intimate friends (never lovers) for all their adult lives. On his twenty-first birthday (they were both poor at the time) she had given him, as a joke, the most horrible, cheap glass vase she could find, in colours a garish parody of Venetian gaiety. Twenty years later, when they were both successful and greying, she visited his home and quarrelled with him over his treatment of a mutual friend. In the course of the quarrel her eye fell upon the old vase, which he still kept in pride of place on his sitting-room mantelpiece, and, without pausing in her tirade, she swept it to the floor, crushing it beyond hope of repair. He never spoke to her again; when she died, half a century later, he refused to visit her deathbed or attend her funeral, even though messengers were sent to tell him that these were her dearest wishes. ‘Tell her, ’ he said to the emissaries, 'that she never knew how much I valued what she broke.’ The emissaries argued, pleaded, raged. If she had not known how much meaning he had invested in the trifle, how could she in all fairness be blamed? And had she not made countless attempts, over the years, to apologize and atone? And she was dying, for heaven’s sake; could not this ancient, childish rift be healed at last? They had lost a lifetime’s friendship; could they not even say goodbye? 'No, ’ said the unforgiving man. — 'Really because of the vase? Or are you concealing some other, darker matter?’ — 'It was the vase, ’ he answered, 'the vase, and nothing but.’ Pamela thought the man petty and cruel, but Chamcha had even then appreciated the curious privacy, the inexplicable inwardness of the issue. 'Nobody can judge an internal injury, ’ he had said, 'by the size of the superficial wound, of the hole. Salman Rushdie
A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.
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Elbert Hubbard
When someone loves you, the way they talk about you is different. You feel safe and comfortable.
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Jess C. Scott
I think if I've learned anything about friendship, it's to hang in, stay connected, fight for them, and let them fight for you. Don't walk away, don't be distracted, don't be too busy or tired, don't take them for granted. Friends are part of the...
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Jon Katz
How many slams in an old screen door? Depends how loud you shut it. How many slices in a bread? Depends how thin you cut it. How much good inside a day? Depends how good you live 'em. How much love inside a friend? Depends...
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Shel Silverstein
The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.
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Friedrich Nietzsche
More Quotes By Salman Rushdie
For a long while I have believed — this is perhaps my version of Sir Darius Xerxes Cama’s belief in a fourth function of outsideness — that in every generation there are a few souls, call them lucky or cursed, who are simply born not...
‎No people whose word for 'yesterday' is the same as their word for 'tomorrow' can be said to have a firm grip on the time.
He did not wish to be divine. If there had never been a God, the emperor thought, it might have been easier to work out what goodness was. This business of worship, of the abnegation of self in the face of the Almighty, was a...
Fury...sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal....drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths
From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.
