Midnight's Children Quotes

“I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I'm gone which would not have happened if I had not come.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

“Memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

“To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

“We all owe death a life.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

“Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

“What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

“‎No people whose word for 'yesterday' is the same as their word for 'tomorrow' can be said to have a firm grip on the time.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

“Who what am I? My answer: I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I’ve gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each ‘I’, every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you’ll have to swallow the world.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

“Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

“What can't be cured must be endured.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

“To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

“Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

“Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

“There is nothing like a War for the reinvention of lives...”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

“I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

“Unless, of course, there's no such thing as chance;...in which case, we should either-optimistically-get up and cheer, because if everything is planned in advance, then we all have a meaning and are spared the terror of knowing ourselves to be random, without a why; or else, of course, we might-as pessimists-give up right here and now, understanding the futility of thought decision action, since nothing we think makes any difference anyway, things will be as they will. Where, then, is optimism? In fate or in chaos?”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

“perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

“Everything has shape, if you look for it. There is no escape from form.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

“What you were is forever who you are.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

“Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each "I", everyone of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

“I learned: the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

“India, the new myth--a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

“For every snake, there is a ladder; for every ladder,a snake”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

“optimism is a disease”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

“What had been (at the beginning) no bigger than a full stop had expanded into a comma, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter; now it was bursting into more complex developments, becoming, one might say, a book - perhaps an encylopaedia - even a whole language...”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

“I have been only the humblest jugglers-with-facts; and that, in a country where the truth is what it is instructed to be, reality quite literally ceases to exist, so that everything becomes possible except what we are told is the case; and maybe this was the difference between my Indian childhood and Pakistani adolescence--that in the first I was beset by an infinity of alternative realities, while in the second I was adrift, disoriented, amid an equally infinite number of falsenesses, unrealities and lies.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

“I fell victim to the temptation of every autobiographer, to the illusion that since the past exists only in one's memories and the words which strive vainly to encapsulate them, it is possible to create past events simply by saying they occurred.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

“Once upon a time there was a mother who, in order to become a mother, had agreed to change her name; who set herself the task of falling in love with her husband bit-by-bit, but who could n ever manage to love one part, the part, curiously enough, which made possible her motherhood; whose feet were hobbled by verrucas and whose shoulders were stooped beneath the accumulating guilts of the world; whose husband's unlovable organ failed to recover from the effects of a freeze; and who, like her husband, finally succumbed to the mysteries of telephones, spending long minutes listening to the words of wrong-number callers . . . shortly after my tenth birthday (when I had recovered from the fever which has recently returned to plague me after an interval of nearly twenty-one years), Amina Sinai resumed her recent practice of leaving suddenly, and always immediately after a wrong number, on urgent shopping trips.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

“معظم الأشياء المهمة في حياتك تحدث في غيابك”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

“...in words and pickles, I have immortalized my memories, although distortions are inevitable in both methods. We must live, I'm afraid, with the shadows of imperfections.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children