“favorites go out of fashion”
““To be thin-skinned, farsighted, and loose-tongued,” he said, “is to feel too sharply, see too clearly, speak too freely. It is to be vulnerable to the world when the world believes itself invulnerable, to understand its mutability when it thinks itself immutable, to sense what’s coming before others sense it, to know that the barbarian future is tearing down the gates of the present while others cling to the decadent, hollow past.”
“The story of the fisherman and the jinni appealed to him, not so much for its fantastic elements (the jinni from the lamp, the magic talking fishes, the bewitched prince who was half man and half marble) as for its technical beauty, the way its stories were folded within other stories and contained yet other stories, folded within themselves, so that the tale became a true mirror of life, Ibn Rushd thought, for in life all our stories contain the stories of others and are themselves contained within larger, grander narratives, the histories of our families, or our homelands, or our beliefs.”
“After Dunia left our world, the voyagers from the world of the jinn to ours became fewer in number, and then they stopped coming completely, and the slits in the world became overgrown with the unimaginative weeds of convention and the thornbushes of the dully material, until they finally closed up, and our ancestors were left to do the best they could without the benefits or curses of magic.”