Daily Inspiration Quote by Salman Rushdie

Rushdie is prying at a quiet trick language plays on us: the way familiarity anesthetizes meaning. A name begins as a little capsule of history - a clue about lineage, place, religion, conquest, aspiration. Then repetition wears it smooth. In “common use,” it turns into pure phonetics, “mere sounds,” and whatever story once clung to it gets “buried” under the “dust of habit.” That image does double work. Dust suggests time and neglect, but also domestic normalcy: the slow accumulation you stop seeing until someone wipes a finger across the surface and exposes what was there all along.

The intent isn’t antiquarian nostalgia for etymology; it’s a warning about how easily culture becomes background noise. Rushdie, a novelist obsessed with migration, hybridity, and contested identities, is alert to how names carry political charge - and how quickly that charge can be neutralized by routine. “Buried…beneath the dust of habit” implies an active forgetting, not an innocent one. Habit is comfort, but it’s also complicity: the daily practice of not asking where things come from, who named them, who got renamed.

Subtextually, the line defends the novelist’s job. Fiction, for Rushdie, is a form of dusting: restoring the strangeness of the ordinary, making the familiar newly legible. If names become “mere sounds,” people can, too - reduced to labels, stereotypes, checkboxes. His sentence insists that the marvel is still there, just covered over, and that attention is an ethical act as much as an aesthetic one.