Rushdie on Meaning

Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to the death.

From Rushdie’s collection of essays and criticism from 1981-91 titled Imaginary Homelands.