Rohinton Mistry quotes - page 2

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. (Rohinton Mistry)
World can be a bewildering place,and dreams and ambitions are often paths to the most pernicious of traps. View quote
Rohinton Mistry
What folly made young people, even those in middle age, think they were immortal? How much better, their lives, if they could remember the end. Carrying your death with you every day would make it hard to waste time on unkindness and anger and bitterness, on anything petty. That was the secret: remembering your dying time, in order to keep the stupid and the ugly out of your living time. View quote
Rohinton Mistry
Let me tell you a secret: there is no such thing as an uninteresting life One day you must tell me your full and complete story, unabridged and unexpurgated.We will set aside some time for it, and meet. It's very important. Maneck smiled. 'Why is it important?' It's extremely important because it helps to remind yourself of who you are. Then you can go forward, without fear of losing yourself in this ever-changing world. View quote
Rohinton Mistry
...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. View quote
Rohinton Mistry
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. View quote
Rohinton Mistry
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. View quote
Rohinton Mistry
Time had changed the magical to mundane. View quote
Rohinton Mistry
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. View quote
Rohinton Mistry
But nobody ever forgot anything, not really, though sometimes they pretended, when it suited them. Memories were permanent. Sorrowful ones remained sad even with the passing of time, yet happy ones could never be recreated - not with the same joy. Remembering bred its own peculiar sorrow. It seemed so unfair: that time should render both sadness and happiness into a source of pain. View quote
Rohinton Mistry
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. (Rohinton Mistry)
...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. View quote
Rohinton Mistry
The Law is a grim, unsmiling thing. Not Justice, though. Justice is witty and whimsical and kind and caring. View quote
Rohinton Mistry
The carnage upon the chessboard of life, left wounded humans in its wake. View quote
Rohinton Mistry
Hahnji, mister, you must be patient. Before you can name that corner, our future must become past. View quote
Rohinton Mistry
There was no such thing as perfect privacy, life was a perpetual concert-hall recital with a captive audience. View quote
Rohinton Mistry
Walk, first, through the fire, then philosophize. View quote
Rohinton Mistry
...People who know about these things say that the short story is the most challenging form, much more so than the novel, because of the precision required; sometimes you have to achieve as much as a novel in a much shorter space and period of time. Had I known that it was the most difficult of forms, I probably would not have started with the short story... View quote
Rohinton Mistry