Time & Perspective Quote by Salman Rushdie

Rushdie’s line feels like a door slammed on a comforting fantasy: that somewhere, somehow, you can duck out of history. The phrase “world without quiet corners” doesn’t just mourn the loss of privacy; it indicts modern life as structurally hostile to refuge. “Quiet corners” suggests the old liberal dream of the private self, a small room where the public can’t intrude. Rushdie implies that room has been demolished.

The brilliance is in the escalation. “History” carries the weight of nations, borders, violence, ideology. Then he drops to “hullabaloo,” a word that sounds almost comic, like background noise or media chatter. Finally, “terrible, unquiet fuss” fuses the two: the trivial and the catastrophic become indistinguishable, a constant agitation that never resolves into silence. It’s a stylistic trick with a political point. When the loudest din is nonstop, the serious and the silly compete on the same stage, and the self gets worn down by volume rather than persuaded by argument.

Context matters with Rushdie because his career is a case study in history refusing to stay outside the door. After The Satanic Verses, “easy escapes” became not just impossible but dangerous to pretend. Read that way, the quote is personal and diagnostic at once: a novelist insisting that art can’t be an apolitical hideout when the world’s arguments have followed you home. The subtext is grimly modern: there is no off-switch, only different frequencies of noise.