Midnight's Children

"There was one more serious problem... they failed to notice the immobility of my eyelids... they observed my icy blueness, but there was not the slightest tremor; until Amina took matters into her own hands and reached into the cradle to stroke my eyelids downwards. They closed: my breathing altered, instantly, to the contented rhythms of sleep. After that, for several months, mother and ayah took it in turns to open and close my lids. "Hell learn, Madam," Mary comforted Amina, "He is a good obedient child and he will get the hang of it for sure." I learned: the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time."

"And there are so many stories to tell, too many, such an excess of intertwined lives events miracles places rumors, so dense a commingling of the improbable and the mundane! I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, youll have to swallow the lot as well."

"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 ..."

"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."

"You be respectable, sister," she said, "Me, Ill be alive."

"Children are vessels where adults pour their poison."

"Hell is other peoples fantasies: every saga requires at least one descent into Jahannum, and I followed Picture Singh into the inky negritude of the Club, holding an infant son in my arms."

"It has often been said that Mrs. Gandhis younger son Sanjay accused his mother of being responsible, through her neglect, for his fathers death; and that this gave him an unbreakable hold over her, so that she became incapable of denying him anything."

"There is no magic on earth strong enough to wipe out the legacies of ones parents."