...because it is the privilige and the curse of midnight's children to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes, and to be unable to live or die in peace.

Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence.

[...] life had once again, perversely, refused to remain life-sized. It had turned melodramatic: and that embarrassed him.

A race that rejected the idea of personal sacrifice would surely be erased from time's records before long.

We walk unknowing amid the shadows of our past and, forgetting our history, are ignorant of ourselves.

Normal doesn't feel so normal to me," I tell him. "It's normal to feel that way," he replies.

But the truth was that she still felt the past moving like a thrombosis in the blood. It might reach her heart and kill her one of these days.

[What Rushdie took away from reading Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum]: Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be ruthless. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things--childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves--that go on slipping like sand, through our fingers.

Nothing is forever, he thought beyond closed eyelids somewhere over Asia Minor. Maybe unhappiness is the continuum through which a human life moves, and joy just a series of blips, of islands in the stream. Or if not unhappiness, then at least melancholy.