Salman Rushdie’s award-winning work is a stunning read. It is a staggering work that goes beyond India and its history. I have no qualms in making it my 600th read as it filled me with awe. Rushdie is truly a literary genius. His book, filled with metaphors, is a wonderful source of quotes as well. Here are some of this quotes that has caught my attention.

If you haven’t read my review of Midnight’s Children, click here. 

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“Memory’s truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also, but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else’s version more than his own.” ~ Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

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“I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I’m gone which would not have happened if I had not come.” ~ Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

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“No people whose word for “yesterday” is the same as their word for “tomorrow” can be said to have a firm grip on the time.” ~ Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

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“… perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque.” ~ Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

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“Midnight has many children, the offspring of Independence were not all human. Violence, corruption, poverty, generals, chaos, greed and pepperpot… I had to go into exile to learn that the children of midnight were more varied than I – even I – had dreamed.” ~ Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

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“Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems – but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.” ~ Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

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“We must be a third principle. we must be the force which drives between the horns of the dilemma; for only by being other, by being new, can we fulfill the promise of our birth” ~ Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

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“I mean quite simply that I have begun to crack all over like an old jug – that my boor body, singular, unlovely, buffeted by too much history, subjected to drainage above and drainage below, mutilated by doors, brained by spittoons, has started coming apart at the seams.” ~ Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

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“A nose like that is a great gift. I say trust it. When it warns you, look out or you’ll be finished. Follow your nose and you’ll go far.” ~ Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

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“What had been, at the beginning, no bigger than a full stop had expanded into a comma, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter; now it was bursting into more complex developments, becoming, one might say, a book – perhaps an encyclopedia, even a whole language.” ~ Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

How about you, what are your favorite quotes from this modern classic? Share it in the comment box.

Happy reading!

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