Rohinton Mistry Quotes
-
Black money is so much a part of our white economy, a tumour in the centre of the brain - try to remove it and you kill the patient.
→ -
Where humans are concerned, the only emotion that made sense was wonder, at their ability to endure.
→ -
Remembering bred its own peculiar sorrow. It seemed so unfair: that time should render both sadness and happiness into a source of pain.
→ -
I think a lot about the past, it's true. But at my age, the past is more present than the here and now. And there is not much percentage in the future.
→ -
...there was another, gorier parturition, when two nations incarnated out of one. A foreigner drew a magic line on a map and called it the new border; it became a river of blood upon the earth. And the orchards, fields, factories, businesses, all on the wrong side of that line, vanished with a wave of the pale conjuror's wand.
→ -
Flirting with madness was one thing; when madness started flirting back, it was time to call the whole thing off.
→ -
Everyone underestimates their own life. Funny thing is, in the end, all our stories...they're the same. In fact, no matter where you go in the world, there is only one important story: of youth, loss and yearning for redemption. So we tell the same story, over and over. Only the details are different.
→ -
Zoroastrianism is about the opposition of good and evil. For the triumph of good, we have to make a choice. We can enlist on the side of good by prospering, making money and using our wealth to help others.
→ -
You see, you cannot draw lines and compartments, and refuse to budge beyond them, sometimes you have to use your failures as stepping stones to success
→ -
Walk, first, through the fire, then philosophize.
→ -
...you have to use your failures as stepping stones to success. You have to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair. In the end it’s all a question of balance.
→ -
If there was an abundance of misery in the world, there was also sufficient joy, yes - as long as one knew where to look for it.
→ -
I met my wife when we were both 19 or 20, at a music school where she was taking voice and piano lessons and I was doing classes in music theory and composition.
→ -
He who spits paan at the ceiling only blinds himself.
→ -
…God is a giant quiltmaker. With an infinite variety of designs. And the quilt is grown so big and confusing, the pattern is impossible to see, the squares and diamonds and triangles don’t fit well together anymore, it’s all become meaningless. So He has abandoned it.
→ -
...the face has limited space. My mother used to say, if you fill your face with laughing, there will be no more room for crying.
→ -
If time were a bolt of cloth,” said Om, “I would cut out all the bad parts. Snip out the scary nights and stitch together the good parts, to make time bearable. Then I could wear it like a coat, always live happily.
→ -
Traffic in the streets of Bombay is chaotic at best. Riding a bicycle is a dangerous occupation. However, there are hundreds of them on the streets competing with the cars and buses and lorries because it is the poor man's mode of transport.
→ -
After all, our lives are but a sequence of accidents - a clanking chain of chance events. A string of choices, casual or deliberate, which add up to that one big calamity we call life.
→ -
Loss is essential. Loss is part and parcel of that necessary calamity called life.
→ -
Distance was a dangerous thing, she knew. Distance changed people.
→ -
How can time be long or short? Time is without length or breadth. The question is, what happened during its passing. And what happened is, our lives have been joined together.
→ -
World can be a bewildering place,and dreams and ambitions are often paths to the most pernicious of traps
→ -
The carnage upon the chessboard of life, left wounded humans in its wake
→ -
In foreign countries they fear baldness. They are so rich in foreign countries, they can afford to fear all kinds of silly things.
→ -
Birth and death - what could be more monstrous than that? We like to deceive ourselves and call it wondrous and beautiful and majestic, but it's freakish, let's face it.
→ -
Loss is essential, loss is part and parcel of that necessary calamity called life. Mind you, I'm not complaining. Thanks to some inexplicable universal guiding force, it is always the worthless things we lose - slough off, like a moulting snake. Losing and losing again, is the very basis of the process, til all we are left with is the bare essence of human existence.
→ -
What an unreliable thing is time--when I want it to fly, the hours stick to me like glue. And what a changeable thing, too. Time is the twine to tie our lives into parcels of years and months. Or a rubber band stretched to suit our fancy. Time can be the pretty ribbon in a little girl's hair. Or the lines in your face, stealing your youthful colour and your hair. .... But in the end, time is a noose around the neck, strangling slowly.
→ -
The worst part of great poverty is that you become blind to it.
→ -
So we tell the same story, over and over. Just the details are different
→