Quotes from Family Matters

Rohinton Mistry ·  500 pages

Rating: (18.5K votes)


“Everyone underestimates their own life. Funny thing is, in the end, all our stories...they're the same. In fact, no matter where you go in the world, there is only one important story: of youth, loss and yearning for redemption. So we tell the same story, over and over. Only the details are different. ”
― Rohinton Mistry, quote from Family Matters


“What folly made young people, even those in middle age, think they were immortal? How much better, their lives, if they could remember the end. Carrying your death with you every day would make it hard to waste time on unkindness and anger and bitterness, on anything petty. That was the secret: remembering your dying time, in order to keep the stupid and the ugly out of your living time.”
― Rohinton Mistry, quote from Family Matters


“The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.”
― Rohinton Mistry, quote from Family Matters


“There's only one way to defeat the sorrow and sadness of life - with laughter and rejoicing. Bring out the good dishes, put on your good clothes, no sense hoarding them.”
― Rohinton Mistry, quote from Family Matters


“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, quote from Family Matters



“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, quote from Family Matters


“If you ignore little things, they become big problems.”
― Rohinton Mistry, quote from Family Matters


“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, quote from Family Matters


“The photographs had made him aware how much the street and the buildings meant to him. Like an extended family that he’d taken for granted and ignored, assuming it would always be there. But buildings and roads and spaces were as fragile as human beings, you had to cherish them while you had them.”
― Rohinton Mistry, quote from Family Matters


“ 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.”
― Rohinton Mistry, quote from Family Matters



“Hell has ways of permeating heaven’s membrane.”
― Rohinton Mistry, quote from Family Matters


“When a culture vansihes, humanity is the loser.”
― Rohinton Mistry, quote from Family Matters


“The bhel-puri stall was a sculptured landscape with its golden pyramid of sev, the little snow mountains of mumra, hillocks of puris, and, in among their valleys, in aluminium containers, pools of green and brown and red chutneys.”
― Rohinton Mistry, quote from Family Matters


“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.”
― Rohinton Mistry, quote from Family Matters


“this was an outstanding family subject in our real life.”
― Rohinton Mistry, quote from Family Matters



“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, quote from Family Matters


“When a culture vanishes, humanity is the loser.”
― Rohinton Mistry, quote from Family Matters


“Hell has ways of permeating heaven's membrane.”
― Rohinton Mistry, quote from Family Matters


About the author

Rohinton Mistry
Born place: in Bombay, India
Born date July 3, 1952
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“There is nothing in the Old Testament to justify the vilification of homosexuals or homosexuality that began with Paul and still manifests virulently in the fundamentalist Right in Amerika. It takes the magical claim that the New Testament is “concealed” in the Old to sustain the illusion of divine sanction for this special hatred of homosexuality. It is more than concealed; it is not there. Paul saw the power of the father in decline. The power of the son was taking its place. The Jews were confused and divided, and patriarchal power was not effectively being maintained by Jewish law. Paul worshiped male power; therefore Paul worshiped the son, was converted to the son’s side when he saw the potential of that side for power. He was opportunistic, politically brilliant, and a master of propaganda. It was the shrewd Paul who finally undermined the law that had for centuries kept patriarchal power intact but now was failing, in decline. He scapegoated homosexuals as unnatural, deceitful, full of malignity, worthy of death, the source of intolerable evil; and then he blamed the Jews, and especially the law of the Jews, for the existence of homosexuality. “Therefore, ” Paul proclaimed in Romans 3: 20, “by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight: for by the law is the knowledge of sin. ” Paul introduced the hatred of homosexuality into the Judeo-Christian tradition, and he introduced the hatred of Jews into it too. In Christian countries, the two groups have suffered contempt, persecution, and death in each other’s shadow ever since; they have been linked by demagogues seeking power through hate—demagogues like Paul; trying to pacify the likes of Paul, they have often enough repudiated and hated each other; and each group has hidden from the soldiers of Christ in its own way.”
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