Rohinton Mistry quotes

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. (Rohinton Mistry)
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.
Rohinton Mistry
All fiction relies on the real world in the sense that we all take in the world through our five senses and we accumulate details, consciously or subconsciously. This accumulation of detail can be drawn on when you write fiction.
Rohinton Mistry
Flirting with madness was one thing; when madness started flirting back, it was time to call the whole thing off.
Rohinton Mistry
Distance was a dangerous thing, she knew. Distance changed people.
Rohinton Mistry
... 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.
Rohinton Mistry
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.
Rohinton Mistry
Money can buy the necessary police order. Justice is sold to the highest bidder.
Rohinton Mistry
What sense did the world make? Where was God, the Bloody Fool? Did He have no notion of fair and unfair? Couldn't He read a simple balance sheet? He would have been sacked long ago if He were managing a corporation, the things he allowed to happen...
Rohinton Mistry
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.
Rohinton Mistry
Remembering bred its own peculiar sorrow. It seemed so unfair: that time should render both sadness and happiness into a source of pain. (Rohinton Mistry)
The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.
Rohinton Mistry
Children don't make judgments about which details are important... a child captures them all.
Rohinton Mistry
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.
Rohinton Mistry
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.
Rohinton Mistry
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.
Rohinton Mistry
Where humans are concerned, the only emotion that made sense was wonder, at their ability to endure...
Rohinton Mistry
Lately you are brooding too much about rights. Give up this dangerous habit.
Rohinton Mistry
The worst part of great poverty is that you become blind to it.
Rohinton Mistry
... 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.
Rohinton Mistry
In the broad sense, as a processing of everything one hears or witnesses, all fiction is autobiographical - imagination ground through the mill of memory. It's impossible to separate the two ingredients. (Rohinton Mistry)
There didn't seem to her any harm in it, and the make-believe was so comforting.
Rohinton Mistry
You have to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair. In the end it's all a question of balance.
Rohinton Mistry
How starved they seemed for ordinary kindness.
Rohinton Mistry
The whole quilt is much more important than any single square.
Rohinton Mistry