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

— Rohinton Mistry

And the further they go, the more they'll remember, they can take it from me.

— Rohinton Mistry

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

— Rohinton Mistry

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

— Rohinton Mistry

But the artist began to have misgivings as the wall underwent its transformation. Bigger than any pavement project he had yet undertaken, it made him restless. Over the years, a precise cycle had entered the rhythm of his life, the cycle of arrival, creation, and obliteration. Like sleeping, waking and stretching, or eating, digesting and excreting, the cycle sang in harmony with the blood in his veins and the breath in his lungs. He learned to disdain the overlong sojourn and the procrastinated departure, for they were the progenitors of complacent routine, to be shunned at all costs. The journey -- chanced, unplanned, solitary -- was the thing to relish. Now, however, his old way of life was being threatened. The agreeable neighborhood and the solidity of the long, black wall were reawakening in him the usual sources of human sorrow: a yearning for permanence, for roots, for something he could call his own....

— 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 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.

— Rohinton Mistry

Democracy is a see-saw between complete chaos and tolerable confusion

— Rohinton Mistry

Depression is a red herring," said Norman. "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

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

— Rohinton Mistry

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

— Rohinton Mistry