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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