Rohinton Mistry Quotes

Sometimes the world seems like a big hole. You spend all your life shouting down it and all you hear are echoes of some idiot yelling nonsense down a hole.

In so far as I have any beliefs, I suppose I'm like that old Peggy Lee song, 'Is That All There Is?' I want to believe there's something else going on, but what that something else is I don't pretend to know.

I've been forgotten by our Good Lord.

To become a villain, you had to have become disillusioned, and in order to become disillusioned you had to have been passionate about something you believed in that was shaken and ripped from your grasp as a protagonist in that stage of your life, leaving you disillusioned with God, if you will.

O world, world when I was younger I thought there was some order governing you and your deeds. But now you seem to be a labyrinth of errors, a frightful desert, a den of wild beasts, a game in which men move in circles…a stony field, a meadow full of serpents, a flowering but barren orchard, a spring of cares, a river of tears, a sea of suffering, a vain hope.

God is a geometrician.

We're living in such a fantasy world where nothing makes sense anymore.

When God ignores you, the devil starts looking good.

I did not understand them but they did not have any mystery, and when I understood them they meant nothing to me. I was sorry about this but there was nothing I could do about it.

Listening (had there been any one to listen) from the upper rooms of the empty house only gigantic chaos streaked with lightning could have been heard tumbling and tossing, as the winds and waves disported themselves like the amorphous bulks of leviathans whose brows are pierced by no light of reason, and mounted one on top of another, and lunged and plunged in the darkness or the daylight (for night and day, month and year ran shapelessly together) in idiot games, until it seemed as if the universe were battling and tumbling, in brute confusion and wanton lust aimlessly by itself.

The Entity who brought the universe into existence must be a Personal Being, for only a person can design with anywhere near this degree of precision.

Sometimes I think I've figured out some order in the universe, but then I find myself in Florida

I used to think that when I got older, the world would make so much more sense. But you know what? The older I get, the more confusing it is to me. The more complicated it is. Harder. You’d think we’d be getting better at it. But there’s just more and more chaos. The pieces—they’re everywhere. And nobody knows what to do about it. I find myself grasping, Nick. You know that feeling? That feeling when you just want the right thing to fall into the right place, not only because it’s right, but because it will mean that such a thing is still possible? I want to believe in that.

Ive seen the meanness of humans till I dont know why God aint put out the sun and gone away.

Then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging,it seems like some long, dirty lie ... and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an accident. But if you believe that, where do you go? What do you do? What does anything matter?

The weird nihilism that permeates Mellon Collie is extremely relevant to what's going on right now. So many kids are intelligent and articulate, but they don't know what to do with themselves.

How come I end up where I started How come I end up where I belong... You used to be alright What happened?

My speech is too fast; my oration confused; love knows no order.

It takes a long while for a naturally trustful person to reconcile himself to the idea that after all God will not help him

Everything depends on this: a fathomless sinking into a fathomless nothingness.

It's rough to go through life with your contents looking as if they settled during shipping.

You know," he said, "I keep wanting to say that it's like Simon Snow threw up in here... but it's more like someone else ate Simon Snow—like somebody went to an all-you-care-to-eat Simon Snow buffet—and then threw up in here.

Life itself is a haphazard, untidy, messy affair.

Our greatest indulgence towards a man springs from our despair of him.

It is a mysterious thing, the loss of faith—as mysterious as faith itself.