Midnight's Children

by Salman Rushdie

And was knocked forever into that middle place, unable to worship a God in whose existence he could not wholly disbelieve. Permanent alteration: a hole.

Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence:

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.)

To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world. I told you that.

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.

an accusing finger, then, which obliged us to look at the city’s dispossessed.

I learned: the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time.

all children have the power to change their parents,

What can’t be cured must be endured. I am doing what must be done.’

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.

‘A death makes the living see themselves too clearly; after they have been in its presence, they become exaggerated.’

For every victorious election campaign, there are twice as many that fail

Memory’s truth, because 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.’

It’s a dangerous business to try and impose one’s view of things on others.

Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.

When you have things, then there is time to dream; when you don’t, you fight.’

that meaning reveals itself only in flashes.

For every snake, there is a ladder; for every ladder, a snake.

‘That’s what elections get you – latrine cleaners and cheap tailors must vote to elect a ruler?’

because human beings, like nations and fictional characters, can simply run out of steam,

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 particulary 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 a world.

Some afflictions, at least, are capable of being conquered.

Watching this scene, Saleem Sinai learned that Picture Singh and the magicians were people whose hold on reality was absolute; they gripped it so powerfully that they could bend it every which way in the service of their arts, but they never forgot what it was.

there is no magic on earth strong enough to wipe out the legacies of one’s parents.)

what can’t be cured, must be endured!

if I began again, would I, too, end in a different place?)