Topic
1981 novel by Salman Rushdie
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“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, you'll 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 ...”
“"You be respectable, sister," she said, "Me, I'll be alive."”
“Children are vessels where adults pour their poison.”
“It has often been said that Mrs. Gandhi's younger son Sanjay accused his mother of being responsible, through her neglect, for his father's death; and that this gave him an unbreakable hold over her, so that she became incapable of denying him anything.”
“Hell is other people's 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.”
Quotes via Wikiquote (CC BY-SA), each with its original source.
Midnight's Children is the second novel by Indian-British writer Salman Rushdie, published in 1981 by Jonathan Cape with cover design by Bill Botten, about India's transition from British colonial rule to independence and partition. It is a postcolonial, postmodern and magical realist story told by its chief protagonist, Saleem Sinai, set in the context of historical events. The style of preserving history with fictional accounts is self-reflexive. In the way it interweaves a personal with a national biography it has similarities to Günter Grass's The Tin Drum.
Not who you're looking for? Others named Midnight's Children: 2012 film by Deepa Mehta