"The Moor's Last Sigh"

It's a good thing that I was told what to look for, otherwise I'd miss the parenthesis in chapter 9: '(O prophetically premature white hair of my ancestors!)'. But this one still baffles a bit: '(I see the morning appearing; and fall silent, discreetly.)'

As with fantasy fiction, bits that are instantly true are very welcome, as they help to ground the reader.

• He was a heavenly body which had managed by an act of will to wrench itself free of its fixed orbit, and now wandered the galaxies accepting whatever destiny might provide. It seemed to Abraham that his father's breakaway from the gravity of the everyday had used up all his reserves of will-power.
• In the slow steps the magic worked, people stopped noticing her.
  
• the larger-than-lifeness of a child's life
• Go behind the door of any household, I want to argue, and you'll find a macabre wonderland as untamed as our own.
  
• In the end, stories are what's left of us, we are no more than the few tales that persist.
  
• Throughout history, efforts to make artists socially accountable had resulted in nullity.
  

Rushdie likes his metaphors.

• The road to the base was thick with defeated sailors, frustrated young men in clean uniforms and filthy moods, young men swirling listlessly like fallen leaves.
• (Those artists) floundered about in the dead sea of the country's ancient heritage.
• Are old Facts never to be replaced by new ones, like lamps; like shoes and ships and every other blessed thing? -... Neither is it made of your common shoe-leather, nor should it spring any leaks. It shines! It walks! It floats!
  

__ Jews, too, moved south in 1492. Ships bearing banished Jews into exile clogged the harbour at Cadiz, obliging the year's other voyager, Columbus, to sail from Palos de Moguer.
__ Raja Ravi Verma,
__ R.K. Laxman's 'Common Man' on page 229

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