Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
“We all owe death a life.”
The Quotatist is a curation of the best quotes from books written by famous authors.
Notable Quotes of Quotable Notes : That is the question 😊
“Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence.”
“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.”
“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.”
“There is nothing like a War for the reinvention of lives...”
“What grows best in the heat: fantasy; unreason; lust.”
“Midnight has many children; the offspring of Independence were not all human. Violence, corruption, poverty, generals, chaos, greed and pepperpots … I had to go into exile to learn that the children of midnight were more varied than I—even I—had dreamed.”
“This is not what I had planned; but perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.”
“Silence, too, has an echo, hollower and longer-lasting than the reverberations of any sound”
“When you’re five and you hurt, you make a big noise unto the world. At ten you whimper. But by the time you make fifteen you begin to eat the poisoned apples that grow on your own inner tree of pain. It’s the Western Way of Enlightenment. You begin to cram your fists into your mouth to stifle the screams. You bleed on the inside.”
“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.
“As a people, we are obsessed with correspondences. Similarities between this and that, between apparently unconnected things, make us clap our hands delightedly when we find them out. It is a sort of national longing for form—or perhaps simply an expression of our deep belief that forms lie hidden within reality; that meaning reveals itself only in flashes.”
About Midnight’s Children:
Midnight's Children is a 1981 novel by author Salman Rushdie. It portrays India's transition from British colonial rule to independence and the partition of India. It is considered an example of postcolonial, postmodern, and magical realist literature.