Quotes by Rohinton Mistry

About Rohinton Mistry:

Rohinton Mistry is an Indian-born Canadian who writes in English. Mistry is of Indian origin, originally from Mumbai, and currently resides in Brampton, Ontario, Canada. He practises Zoroastrianism and belongs to the Parsi community. Mistry is a Neustadt International Prize for Literature laureate (2012).
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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.

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

A lifetime had to be crafted, just like anything else, she thought, it had to be moulded and beaten and burnished in order to get the most out of it.

Rohinton Mistry

There must be a lot of duplication in our country’s laws," said Dukhi. "Every time there are elections, they talk of passing the same ones passed twenty years ago. Someone should remind them they need to apply the laws." "For politicians, passing l...

Rohinton Mistry

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...

Rohinton Mistry

Who would want to enter the soiled Temple of Justice, wherein lies the corpse of justice, slain by her very guardians? And now her killers make mock of the sacred process, selling replicas of her blind virtue to the highest bidder.

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

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

Rohinton Mistry

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 c...

Rohinton Mistry

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.

Rohinton Mistry

The joy and laughter and youth they brought was an antidote to the somberness enveloping his flat, the hours when he felt the very walls and ceilings were encrusted with the distress of of unhappy decades

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

Children don't make judgments about which details are important... a child captures them all.

Rohinton Mistry

Multilate. Ha Ha Ha,' said Nusswan, avuncular and willing to pretend it was a clever joke. 'Its all relative. At the best of times, democracy is a see saw between complete chaos and tolerable confusion. You see, to make a democratic omelette you have...

Rohinton Mistry

...loss is essential, loss is part and parcel of that necessary calamity called life. Mind you, I'm not complaining. Thanks to some inexplicable universal guiding force, it is always the worthless things we lose - slough off, like a moulting snake. L...

Rohinton Mistry

Does it stand, but not straight enough? Is there a bend in the tool? Leaning left like the Marxist-Leninist Party? To the right, like the Jan Sangh fascists? Or wobbling mindlessly in the middle, like the Congress Party? Fear not, for it can be strai...

Rohinton Mistry

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

Rohinton Mistry

The worst part of great poverty is that you become blind to 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

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

Author Bio

  • NameRohinton Mistry
  • DescriptionCanadian writer
  • BornJuly 3, 1952
  • CountryCanada
  • ProfessionWriter
  • WorksSuch A Long Journey; A Fine Balance
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship; Scotiabank Giller Prize; Commonwealth Writers' Prize; Neustadt International Prize For Literature