Midnight's Children

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, I'll be alive."

Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each "I", everyone of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world.

There is no magic on earth strong enough to wipe out the legacies of one's parents.

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.

Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison.