## Metadata - Author: [[Salman Rushdie]] - Full Title: Midnight's Children - Category: #books ## Highlights - Longevity is the real prize for which writers strive, and it isn’t awarded by any jury. ([Location 80](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003WUYQCS&location=80)) - Tags: [[pink]] - This is why we do what we do: to make works of art that, if we are very lucky, will endure. ([Location 82](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003WUYQCS&location=82)) - Tags: [[pink]] - The Adventures of Augie March ([Location 91](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003WUYQCS&location=91)) - Tags: [[pink]] - The Making of the Representative from Planet ([Location 93](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003WUYQCS&location=93)) - important ([Location 206](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003WUYQCS&location=206)) - Note: interesting style - Recite, in the name of the Lord thy Creator, who created Man from clots of blood.) ([Location 223](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003WUYQCS&location=223)) - tussock ([Location 224](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003WUYQCS&location=224)) - Tags: [[orange]] - inch, she has lost her “city eyes.” When you have city eyes you cannot see the invisible people, the men with elephantiasis of the balls and the beggars in boxcars don’t impinge on you, and the concrete sections of future drainpipes don’t look like dormitories. ([Location 1625](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003WUYQCS&location=1625)) - Tags: [[pink]] - He smelled faintly of future failure; he mistreated servants; perhaps he wished that, instead of following his late father into the leathercloth business, ([Location 1653](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003WUYQCS&location=1653)) - Tags: [[pink]] - eyes lapping her up like bright rough cats’ tongues; and as Lifafa talks, soothingly, my mother feels her will ebbing away, What ([Location 1675](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003WUYQCS&location=1675)) - Tags: [[pink]] - a heavy man with several chins, wearing white stained trousers and a red check shirt and no shoes, munching aniseed and drinking from a bottle of Vimto, sitting cross-legged in a room on whose walls are pictures of Vishnu in each of his avatars, and notices reading, WRITING TAUGHT, and SPITTING DURING VISIT IS QUITE A BAD HABIT. There is no furniture … and Shri Ramram Seth is sitting cross-legged, six inches above the ground. ([Location 1692](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003WUYQCS&location=1692)) - Tags: [[pink]] - At first they became raucous, shouting the praises of their favorite whores in Pushtu; then they fell into wild giggling as the soft fluttering fingers of the drug tickled their ribs ([Location 1795](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003WUYQCS&location=1795)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Our Bombay: it looks like a hand but it’s really a mouth, always open, always hungry, swallowing food and talent from everywhere else in India. A glamorous leech, producing nothing except films bush-shirts ([Location 2494](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003WUYQCS&location=2494)) - 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. Suppose yourself in a large cinema, sitting at first in the back row, and gradually moving up, row by row, until your nose is almost pressed against the screen. Gradually the stars’ faces dissolve into dancing grain; tiny details assume grotesque proportions; the illusion dissolves—or rather, it becomes clear that the illusion itself is reality … ([Location 3280](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003WUYQCS&location=3280)) - lurked a not-very-tidy mind, as full of bric-a-brac as nine-year-old pockets ([Location 3363](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003WUYQCS&location=3363)) - My mother Amina, who had married for children, felt the uncreated lives rotting in her womb and blamed herself for becoming unattractive to him, what with her corns and all. ([Location 3467](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003WUYQCS&location=3467)) - Americans have mastered the universe, but have no dominion over their mouths; whereas India is impotent, but her children tend to have excellent teeth.) ([Location 3584](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003WUYQCS&location=3584)) - whose beauty was so intense that within moments of her birth it succeeded in blinding her mother and the neighboring women who had been assisting at her delivery; her father, rushing ([Location 3892](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003WUYQCS&location=3892)) - from Kashmir, there was a blue-eyed child of whose original sex I was never certain, since by immersing herself in water he (or she) could alter it as she (or he) pleased. Some of us called this child Narada, others Markandaya, depending on which old fairy story of sexual change we had heard ([Location 3909](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003WUYQCS&location=3909)) - “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.” ([Location 4153](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003WUYQCS&location=4153)) - THERE WAS TURMOIL in Bombay in the months after the election; there is turmoil in my thoughts as I recall those days. ([Location 4380](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003WUYQCS&location=4380)) - “Hey, Saleem, isn’t it? Hey, man, what happened to you?” I was dragged out of my bitter, solitary reverie (even Sonny had someone to dance with; but then, he had his forcep-hollows, and he didn’t wear underpants—there were reasons for his attractiveness) ([Location 4584](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003WUYQCS&location=4584)) - “Mrs. Sinai, your blood group, please? The boy has lost blood. A transfusion may be necessary.” And Amina: “I am A; but my husband, O.” And now she is crying, breaking down, and still the doctor, “Ah; in that case, are you aware of your son’s …” But she, the doctor’s daughter, must admit she cannot answer the question: Alpha or Omega? “Well in that case a very quick test; but on the subject of rhesus?” My mother, through her tears: “Both my husband and I, rhesus positive.” And the doctor, “Well, good, that at least.” ([Location 4627](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003WUYQCS&location=4627)) - but Saleem Sinai, perennial victim, persists in seeing himself as protagonist. ([Location 4667](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003WUYQCS&location=4667)) - It was the first time I had ever been on a real ship (occasional visits to American warships in Bombay harbor didn’t count, being merely tourism; and there was always the embarrassment of being in the company of dozens of highly-pregnant ladies, who always came on these tour parties in the hope that they would enter labor and give birth to children who qualified, by virtue of their seaborne birth, for American citizenship). ([Location 5575](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003WUYQCS&location=5575)) - That night, Ahmed Sinai’s heart began to bulge. Overfull of hate resentment self-pity grief, it became swollen like a balloon, it beat too hard, skipped beats, and finally felled him like an ox; at the Breach Candy Hospital the doctors discovered that my father’s heart had actually changed shape—a new swelling had pushed lumpily out of the lower left ventricle. It had, to use Alice’s word, “booted.” ([Location 5814](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003WUYQCS&location=5814))