Top 80 Rohinton Mistry Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “In the end, it’s all a question of balance.”

— Rohinton Mistry

Featured in: Quotes About Balance

2. “If you ignore little things, they become big problems.”

— Rohinton Mistry

3. “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

4. “You have to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair.”

— Rohinton Mistry

5. “Loss is essential. Loss is part and parcel of that necessary calamity called life.”

— Rohinton Mistry

6. “After all, our lives are but a sequence of accidents – a clanking chain of chance events. A string of choices, casual or deliberate, which add up to that one big calamity we call life.”

— Rohinton Mistry

7. “You have to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair. In the end it’s all a question of balance.”

— Rohinton Mistry

8. “So we tell the same story, over and over. Just the details are different.”

— Rohinton Mistry

9. “You see, you cannot draw lines and compartments, and refuse to budge beyond them, sometimes you have to use your failures as stepping stones to success.”

— Rohinton Mistry

10. “Zoroastrianism is about the opposition of good and evil. For the triumph of good, we have to make a choice. We can enlist on the side of good by prospering, making money and using our wealth to help others.”

— Rohinton Mistry

11. “All fiction relies on the real world in the sense that we all take in the world through our five senses and we accumulate details, consciously or subconsciously. This accumulation of detail can be drawn on when you write fiction.”

— Rohinton Mistry

12. “In the broad sense, as a processing of everything one hears or witnesses, all fiction is autobiographical – imagination ground through the mill of memory. It’s impossible to separate the two ingredients.”

— Rohinton Mistry

13. “You see, we cannot draw lines and compartments and refuse to budge beyond them. Sometimes you have to use your failures as stepping-stones to success. You have to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair.′ He paused, considering what he had just said. ‘Yes’, he repeated. ‘In the end, it’s all a question of balance.”

— Rohinton Mistry

14. “Money can buy the necessary police order. Justice is sold to the highest bidder.”

— Rohinton Mistry

15. “Flirting with madness was one thing; when madness started flirting back, it was time to call the whole thing off.”

— Rohinton Mistry

16. “Distance was a dangerous thing, she knew. Distance changed people.”

— Rohinton Mistry

17. “But how firm to stand, how much to bend? Where was the line between compassion and foolishness, kindness and weakness? And that was from her position. From theirs, it might be a line between mercy and cruelty, consideration and callousness. She could draw it on this side, but they might see it on that side.”

— Rohinton Mistry

18. “The Law is a grim, unsmiling thing. Not Justice, though. Justice is witty and whimsical and kind and caring.”

— Rohinton Mistry

19. “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

20. “If there was an abundance of misery in the world, there was also sufficient joy, yes – as long as one knew where to look for it.”

— Rohinton Mistry

21. “There was no such thing as perfect privacy, life was a perpetual concert-hall recital with a captive audience.”

— Rohinton Mistry

22. “The whole quilt is much more important than any single square.”

— Rohinton Mistry

23. “But nobody ever forgot anything, not really, though sometimes they pretended, when it suited them. Memories were permanent. Sorrowful ones remained sad even with the passing of time, yet happy ones could never be recreated – not with the same joy. Remembering bred its own peculiar sorrow. It seemed so unfair: that time should render both sadness and happiness into a source of pain.”

— Rohinton Mistry

24. “He who spits paan at the ceiling only blinds himself.”

— Rohinton Mistry

25. “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

26. “I met my wife when we were both 19 or 20, at a music school where she was taking voice and piano lessons and I was doing classes in music theory and composition.”

— Rohinton Mistry

27. “Did life treat everyone so wantonly, ripping the good things to pieces while letting bad things fester and grow like fungus on unrefrigerated food? Vasantrao Valmik the proofreader would say it was all part of living, that the secret of survival was to balance hope and despair, to embrace change. But embrace misery and destruction?”

— Rohinton Mistry

28. “At the best of times, democracy is a seesaw between complete chaos and tolerable confusion. You see, to make a democratic omelette you have to break a few democratic eggs. To fight fascism and other evil forces threatening our country, there is nothing wrong in taking strong measures.”

— Rohinton Mistry

29. “Time had changed the magical to mundane.”

— Rohinton Mistry

30. “Remembering bred its own peculiar sorrow. It seemed so unfair: that time should render both sadness and happiness into a source of pain.”

— Rohinton Mistry

31. “The carnage upon the chessboard of life, left wounded humans in its wake.”

— Rohinton Mistry

32. “Where humans are concerned, the only emotion that made sense was wonder, at their ability to endure...”

— Rohinton Mistry

33. “He kept looking for new experiences, and though he was very successful at everything he attempted, it did not bring him happiness. Remember this, success alone does not bring happiness. Nor does failure have to bring unhappiness.”

— Rohinton Mistry

34. “How can time be long or short? Time is without length or breadth. The question is, what happened during its passing. And what happened is, our lives have been joined together.”

— Rohinton Mistry

35. “Walk, first, through the fire, then philosophize...”

— Rohinton Mistry

36. “Time is the twine to tie our lives into parcels of years and months. Or a rubber band stretched to suit our fancy. Time can be the pretty ribbon in a little girl’s hair. Or the lines in your face, stealing your youthful colour and your hair.’ He sighed and smiled sadly. ‘But in the end, time is a noose around the neck, strangling slowly.”

— Rohinton Mistry

37. “But so far, the invisible line was holding, separating the potential from its realization. Strange, that invisible lines could be so powerful, thought Maneck – strong as brick walls.”

— Rohinton Mistry

38. “The answers were not easy to come by, they lay in the garden of the past, which memory had dug up and replanted in plots of its own choosing.”

— Rohinton Mistry

39. “Ishvar left the trunk he was packing on the verandah, and came in. He sat on the bed, putting his around him. “You know, Maneck, the human face has limited space. My mother used to say, if you fill your face with laughing, there will be no room for crying.”

— Rohinton Mistry

40. “The worst part of great poverty is that you become blind to it.”

— Rohinton Mistry

41. “Daughter-in-law is just a word. Call her anything you like. The hand of good fortune is not fussy about words.”

— Rohinton Mistry

42. “But too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart, as my favourite poet has written.’ ‘Who’s that?’ ‘W. B. Yeats. And I think that sometimes normal behaviour has to be suppressed, in order to carry on.’ ‘I’m not sure,’ said Maneck. ‘Wouldn’t it be better to respond honestly instead of hiding it? Maybe if everyone in the country was angry or upset, it might change things, force the politicians to behave properly.”

— Rohinton Mistry

43. “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

44. “You cannot draw lines and compartments and refuse to budge beyond them. Sometimes you have to use your failures as stepping stones to success. You have to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair.”

— Rohinton Mistry

45. “The future was becoming past, everything vanished into the void, and reaching back to grasp for something, one came out clutching – what? A bit of string, scraps of cloth, shadows of the golden time. If one could only reverse it, turn the past into future, and catch it on the wing, on its journey across the always shifting line of the present...”

— Rohinton Mistry

46. “Traffic in the streets of Bombay is chaotic at best. Riding a bicycle is a dangerous occupation. However, there are hundreds of them on the streets competing with the cars and buses and lorries because it is the poor man’s mode of transport.”

— Rohinton Mistry

47. “Lately you are brooding too much about rights. Give up this dangerous habit.”

— Rohinton Mistry

48. “There didn’t seem to her any harm in it, and the make-believe was so comforting.”

— Rohinton Mistry

49. “But in the end, time is a noose around the neck, strangling slowly.”

— Rohinton Mistry

50. “There is always hope – hope enough to balance our despair. Or we would be lost.”

— Rohinton Mistry