Midnight's Children is an epic book of magical realism, a poioumenon about India's transition from British colonialism to independence. It was written by Salman Rushdie in 1981 and is considered an example of postcolonial literature. The story is expressed through various characters and is contexted by actual historical events as with historical fiction.

Midnight's Children won both the 1981 Booker Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for the same year. It was awarded the "Booker of Bookers" Prize and the best all-time prize winners in 1993 and 2008 to celebrate the Booker Prize 25th and 40th anniversary. Midnight's Children is also the only Indian novel on Time's list of the 100 best English-language novels since its founding in 1923.

Midnight's Children (1980) by Salman Rushdie

• "Hell is other people's fantasies..."
  • Source: "Abracadabra"

• "[T]here is no magic on earth strong enough to wipe out the legacies of one's parents."
  • Source: "The Shadow of the Mosque"

• "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," every one 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."
  • Source: "Sam and the Tiger"

• "You be respectable, sister," she said, "Me, I'll be alive."
  • Source: "How Saleem Achieved Purity"

• "There was one more serious problem... they failed to notice the immobility of my eyelids... they observed my icy blueness, but there was not the slightest tremor; until Amina took matters into her own hands and reached into the cradle to stroke my eyelids downwards. They closed: my breathing altered, instantly, to the contented rhythms of sleep. After that, for several months, mother and ayah took it in turns to open and close my lids. "He'll learn, Madam," Mary comforted Amina, "He is a good obedient child and he will get the hang of it for sure." I learned: the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time."
  • Source: The Fisherman's Pointing Finger

• "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."
  • Source: "Tick, Tock"