Haroun and the sea of stories -- Salman Rushdie

These days, I read non fiction articles and books for the plain reason that I should get insight from the true stories and given my limited reading time, i should devote it to some quality non fiction books. But my attention was caught by a novel written by Salman Rushdie. As the title suggests, Haroun has a sea of stories.

Aside from the fantasy creatures and comical lines in the novel, i found some serious insights -- that we need love, that we cannot deny such fact, that love inspires stories, that we need stories to enrich our soul, that we need story telling however tall and wide are the tales.... We need stories to survive as human beings.

Since it is election time, I should mention the portion where voters wanted tall tales from a storytellers eventhough they know that they are not true but it makes them happy unlike the words from politicians which are unbelievable....Here I quote some lines....

"It was well known that if you could get Rashid's magic tongue on your side then your troubles were over. Nobody ever believed anyhting a politico said, even though they pretended as hard as they could that they were telling the truth."

Here are some underlined lines in my book...

On need to be loved and denying that we have a need results in many cover up actions...
"O, Need's a funny fish: it makes people untruthful. They all suffer from it, but they will not always admit."

On naming a thing but I think this applies to writing a story too...
"To give a thing a name, a label, a handle; to rescue it from anonymity, to pluck it out of the Place of Namelessness, in short to identify it -- well, that's a way of bringing the said thing into being."

"You know how people are, new things, always new. The old tales, nobody cares."