The Museum of Failures Quotes

“There is no room for hope in the museum of failures. Even if it hangs on the walls for a moment, it usually comes crashing down.”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Museum of Failures

“Because the only way to destroy the museum of failures is to burn every shameful secret that it has ever held.”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Museum of Failures

“in India, dreaming could undo a man.”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Museum of Failures

“Why did human beings need to invent heaven and hell? Remy wondered. It was all here on Earth:”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Museum of Failures

“He needed to rearrange the kaleidoscope in his head,”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Museum of Failures

“He now lived in a country riven by the same tribalism and hatreds that haunted lesser nations. He had always seen American democracy as a giant oak tree, with roots that went more than two hundred years deep. But it turned out the roots were shallow, held in place by custom and good manners, and all it took to lay them bare was one man who refused to play by the rules of civility and democracy.”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Museum of Failures

“Choose wisely. Believe me, ninety percent of life’s happiness comes from selecting the right life partner.”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Museum of Failures

“Of course, there were unhappy people everywhere on earth, and if you catalogued all their griefs and disappointments, every place could be considered a museum of failures. One could argue that this was the universal human condition.”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Museum of Failures

“He had often thought of Bombay as the museum of failures, an exhibit hall filled with thwarted dreams and broken promises.”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Museum of Failures

“Because, ultimately everybody's story was written in scars.”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Museum of Failures

“The museum of failures had claimed its latest victim.”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Museum of Failures

“Write your own, beautiful story, emblazed with stardust.”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Museum of Failures

“This was what held the world together, this unsung army of silently suffering standing women.”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Museum of Failures

“raison d’être, my reason for breathing.”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Museum of Failures

“By treating her son as less than human, they had diminished their own humanity.”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Museum of Failures

“eternal burden of the immigrant, the divided soul.”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Museum of Failures

“Love itself was a mystery”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Museum of Failures

“city of duality and wild contradictions, of skyscraper and slum.”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Museum of Failures

“children believe that the world begins with their birth. But to be an adult was to acknowledge the endless circles of life that began before one’s time and would continue long after, to realize that one’s story was shaped and written by unknown others. His own history had begun so much earlier than his actual story began. Cyrus’s choices, made for reasons he wasn’t alive to defend or rationalize, had bled into his own. Remy looked around, and for a quick moment, he saw beyond the row of parked cars, the storefronts shuttered for the night, the dog raising its leg to pee on the tires of a parked scooter. Instead,”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Museum of Failures

“Of all natural phenomena, sunrise was the most predictable and yet, he believed, the most extraordinary. Dawn was the miracle that made every other miracle possible, but it was also the one that humans took most for granted. Millions of people literally slept through life’s greatest magic show.”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Museum of Failures

“...[i]t was always there, the sea, a silent witness to the human theater of this island city. Its omnipresence reminded Remy of his first visit to Seattle. He had gone for a run on a damp, foggy Sunday morning. But the fog had lifted as he ran, and at one point he'd turned around, and there behind him, squatting like the Buddha, like God himself, was Mount Rainier, in all its majestic, snowcapped glory. Remy had stopped, thunderstruck, feeling as if he were staring at the face of God. The fact that the mountain had been there all along, watching him from behind the curtain of the morning fog, had made its sudden appearance seem more mystical.”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Museum of Failures

“This was how destiny was formed, Remy decided, not by what was written in the stars by some distant god, but by human choice and effort and courage. All he had to do was be brave.”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Museum of Failures

“what was written in the stars by some distant god, but by human choice and effort and courage. All he had to do was be brave.”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Museum of Failures

“destiny was formed, Remy decided, not by”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Museum of Failures

“ninety percent of life’s happiness comes from selecting the right life partner.”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Museum of Failures

“live a large and robust life.”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Museum of Failures

“Nobody, nobody had loved Cyloo’s body as hard as the fire had.”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Museum of Failures

“broken pieces to organize themselves into a new reality. Up was down, and”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Museum of Failures

“he’d been groomed by his father to leave India,”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Museum of Failures

“Remy’s golden daylight. In other words, a perfect galaxy.”
― Thrity Umrigar, The Museum of Failures