138 Quotes by Rohinton Mistry

But so far, the invisible line was holding, separating the potential from its realization. Strange, that invisible lines could be so powerful, thought Maneck – strong as brick walls.

Everyone underestimates their own life. Funny thing is, in the end, all our stories – your life, my life, old Husain’s life, they’re the same. In fact, no matter where you go in the world, there is only one important story: of youth, and loss, and yearning for redemption. So we tell the same story, over and over. Just the details are different.

But in the end, time is a noose around the neck, strangling slowly.

Did life treat everyone so wantonly, ripping the good things to pieces while letting bad things fester and grow like fungus on unrefrigerated food? Vasantrao Valmik the proofreader would say it was all part of living, that the secret of survival was to balance hope and despair, to embrace change. But embrace misery and destruction?

Marriage is like death, only happens once.

But nobody ever forgot anything, not really, though sometimes they pretended, when it suited them. Memories were permanent. Sorrowful ones remained sad even with the passing of time, yet happy ones could never be recreated – not with the same joy. Remembering bred its own peculiar sorrow. It seemed so unfair: that time should render both sadness and happiness into a source of pain.

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 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...

He placed his hand over his heart. “In here, there is limitless room – happiness, kindness, sorrow, anger, friendship – everything fits in here.