Iff and Butt...

At the end of my Children's Literature class, my professor, Dr. Tom Hanks, asked us for suggestions of children's literature that we might add to the course for next year.  One student suggested Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie.  She said it would fit perfectly with the theme of our course.  Everyone in the class was quick to write it down, hoping to someday make it part of their own, personal reading repertoire. 

When I came home this summer, my brother, Colin, said that the only good book he read this past semester in British Literature was none other than Haroun and the Sea of Stories.  And when Colin says he likes a book, it is, without a doubt, a book worth reading.

So I read it.  And it is good!  The following are some of my favorite quotes from Haroun.  Enjoy!

" 'A person may choose what he cannot see,' he said, as if explaining something very obvious to a very foolish individual. 'A person may mention a bird's name even if the creature is not present and correct: crow, quail, hummingbird, bulbul, mynah, parrot, kite. A person may even select a flying creature of his own invention, for example winged horse, flying turtle, airborne whale, space serpent, aeromouse. 

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. Or, in this case, the said bird or Imaginary Flying Organism.' "

-page 63

"He looked into the water and saw that it was made up of a thousand thousand thousand and one different currents, each one a different colour, weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity; and Iff explained that these were the Streams of Story, that each coloured strand represented and contained a single tale."

-page 71-2

" 'I always thought storytelling was like juggling,' he finally found the voice to say. 'You keep a lot of different tales in the air, and juggle them up and down, and if you're good you don't drop any. So maybe juggling is a kind of storytelling, too.' "

-page 109

" 'But but but what is the point of giving persons Freedom of Speech,' declaimed Butt the Hoopoe, 'if you then say they must not utilize same? And is not the Power of Speech the greatest Power of all? Then surely it must be exercised to the full?' "

-page 119

" 'But it's not as simple as that,' he told himself, because the dance of the Shadow Warrior showed him that silence had its own grace and beauty (just as speech could be graceless and ugly); and that Action could be as lovely as the children of the light. 'If Guppees and Chupwalas didn't hate each other so,' he thought, 'they might actually find each other pretty interesting. Opposites attract, as they say.' "

-page 125

The evil Khattam-Shud: " 'Your world, my world, all worlds,' came the reply. 'They are all there to be Ruled. And inside every single story, inside every Stream in the Ocean, there lies a world, a story-world, that I cannot Rule at all. And that is the reason why.' "

-page 161

" 'Happy endings must come at the end of something,' the Walrus pointed out. 'If they happen in the middle of a story, of an adventure, of the like, all they do is cheer things up for a while.'

'That'll do,' said Haroun.

Then it was time to go home.

-page 202

Hope this has whet your appetite!