Quotes by Rohinton Mistry

…God is a giant quiltmaker. With an infinite variety of designs. And the quilt is grown so big and confusing, the pattern is impossible to see, the squares and diamonds and triangles don’t fit well together anymore, it’s all become meaningless. So He has abandoned it.

...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.

You see, we cannot draw lines and compartments and refuse to budge beyond them. Sometimes you have to use your failures as stepping-stones to success. You have to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair. He paused, considering what he had just said. Yes, he repeated. In the end, its all a question of balance.

Birth and death - what could be more monstrous than that? We like to deceive ourselves and call it wondrous and beautiful and majestic, but its freakish, lets face it.

...I always took the rearmost seat in the classroom - it gave me a good view of things. And I must confess, the location taught me more about human nature and justice than could be learned from the professors lectures.

What an unreliable thing is time--when I want it to fly, the hours stick to me like glue. And what a changeable thing, too. Time is the twine to tie our lives into parcels of years and months. Or a rubber band stretched to suit our fancy. Time can be the pretty ribbon in a little girls hair. Or the lines in your face, stealing your youthful colour and your hair. .... But in the end, time is a noose around the neck, strangling slowly.

People forget how vulnerable they are despite their shirts and shoes and briefcases, how this hungry and cruel world could strip them, put them in the same position as my beggars.

Look at that crowd, he said disgustedly. They think its a circus.And not a single coin are they donating, said Dina.Thats not surprising. Pity can only be shown in small doses. When so many beggars are in one place, the public goes like this - he put his fists to his eyes, like binoculars.

Distance was a dangerous thing, she knew. Distance changed people.

Remembering bred its own peculiar sorrow. It seemed so unfair: that time should render both sadness and happiness into a source of pain.

Black money is so much a part of our white economy, a tumour in the centre of the brain - try to remove it and you kill the patient.

The pavement artist thought for a bit, then agreed. I can start tomorrow morning.Good, good. But one question. Will you be able to draw enough to cover 300 feet? I mean, do you know enough different gods to fill the whole wall?The artist smiled. There is no difficulty. I can cover 300 miles if necessary. Using assorted religions and their gods, saints, and prophets. Hindu, Sikh, Judaic, Christian, Muslim, Zoroastrian, Buddhist, Jainist. Actually, Hinduism alone can produce enough. But I always like to mix them up, include a variety in my drawings. Makes me feel I am doing something to promote tolerance and understanding in the world.

The future was becoming past, everything vanished into the void, and reaching back to grasp for something, one came out clutching - what? A bit of string, scraps of cloth, shadows of the golden time. If one could only reverse it, turn the past into future, and catch it on the wing, on its journey across the always shifting line of the present ...

...loss is essential, loss is part and parcel of that necessary calamity called life. Mind you, Im not complaining. Thanks to some inexplicable universal guiding force, it is always the worthless things we lose - slough off, like a moulting snake. Losing and losing again, is the very basis of the process, til all we are left with is the bare essence of human existence...

How starved they seemed for ordinary kindness

Narayan explained how they had spent the morning, and Dukhi laughed to hear it. the entire episode made Radha furious. Why must you torment the boy? There is no need to make my Om do such dirty work....How will he appreciate what he has if he does not learn what his forefathers did? Once a week he will come with me! Whether he likes it or not!

Curious, he thought, how, if you knew a person long enough, he could elicit every kind of emotion from you, every possible reaction, envy, admiration, pity, irritation, fury, fondness, jealousy, love, disgust. But in the end all human beings became candidates for compassion, all of us, without exception...and if we could recognize this from the beginning, what a saving in pain and grief and misery.

The return of solitude was not quite as Dina expected it to be. These many years I made a virtue of inescapable reality, she thought, calling it peace and quiet.

Did life treat everyone so wantonly, ripping the good things to pieces while letting bad things fester and grow like fungus

Depression is a red herring, said Nariman. I think a lot about the past, its true. But at my age, the past is more present than the here and now. and there is not much percentage in the future.