Gregory David Roberts Quotes

The clue to everything a man should love and fear in her was there right from the start in the ironic smile that primed and swelled the archery of her full lips. There was pride in that smile and confidence in the set of her fine nose. Without understanding why I knew beyond question that a lot of people would mistake her pride for arrogance and confuse her confidence with impassivity. I didn't make that mistake. My eyes were lost swimming floating free in the shimmering lagoon of her steady even stare. Her eyes were large and spectacularly green. It was the green that trees are in vivid dreams. It was the green that the sea would be if the sea were perfect.

Our decisions become narratives: fated choices that unknowably change the course of the living river. In the present, where decisions and connections are made, Fate waits on the riverbank of Story, leaving us to our mistakes and miracles, because it's our will alone that leads us to one or the other.

Now sadly there is attitude and no style.

When we act, even with the best of intentions, when we interfere with the world, we always risk a new disaster that mightn't be of our making, but that wouldn't occur without our action.

Motive matters more with good deeds than it does with bad.

I know now what was happening to me, what was overwhelming me, what was about to consume and almost destroy me. Didier had even given me a name for it - assassin grief, he'd once called it: the kind of grief that lies in wait and attacks you from ambush, with no warning and no mercy. I know now that assassin grief can hide for years and then strike suddenly on the happiest day, without discernible reason or exegesis. But on that day, ... almost a year after Khader's death, I couldn't understand the dark and trembling mood that was moving in me, swelling to the sorrow I'd too long denied. I couldn't understand it, so i tried to fight it as a man fights pain or despair. But you can't bite down on assassin grief and will it away. The enemy stalks you, step for step, and knows your every move before you make it. The enemy is your own grieving heart and, when it strikes, it can't miss.

If fate doesn't make you laugh, then you just don't get the joke.

The source of all things, the luminescence, has more forms than heaven's stars, sure. And one good thought is all it takes to make it shine. But a single mistake can burn down a forest in your heart, hiding all the stars, in all the skies. And while a mistake's still burning, ruined love or lost faith can make you think you're done, and you can't go on. But it's not true. It's never true. No matter what you do, no matter where you're lost, the luminescence never leaves you. Any good thing that dies inside can rise again, if you want it hard enough. The heart doesn't know how to quit, because it doesn't know how to lie. You lift your eyes from the page, fall into the smile of a perfect stranger, and the searching starts all over again. It's not what it was, It's always different. It's always something else. But the new forest that grows back in a scarred heart is sometimes wilder and stronger than it was before the fire. And if you stay there, in that shine within yourself, that new place for the light, forgiving everything and never giving up, sooner or later you'll always find yourself right back there where love and beauty made the world: at the beginning. The beginning. The beginning.

Friendship is an Algebra test that nobody passes.

What I do know now, and didn't know then is that, in the long run, motive matters more with good deeds than it does with bad. When all the guilt and shame for the bad we've done have run their course, it's the good we did that can save us.

Sometimes you break your heart in the right way, if you know what I mean.

There is nothing so depressing as good advice, and I will be pleased if you do not inflict it upon me. Frankly, I am shocked at you. You must know this, surely? Some years ago I suffered such an offensively gratuitous piece of good advice that I was depressed for six months afterward. It was a very close call - I almost never recovered.

Slowly, desolately, the fist of what we'd done unclenched the clawed palm of what we'd become.

There is no act of faith more beautiful than the generosity of the very poor.

The smile he gave me was warm, but he was still wounded by his mother's death. There was a hollowness in his eyes: a black hole of shocked grieving that swallowed all the questions and released no answers. When he returned to his work, cutting lengths of coconut-fibre rope for the men to tie around bamboo bracing poles, his young face assumed a numb expression. I knew that expression: I sometimes caught it, by chance, in the mirror: the way we look when the part of happiness that's trusting and innocent is ripped away, and we blame ourselves, rightly or wrongly, for its loss.

the student is ready, the teacher appears - do

Civilization, after all, is defined by what we forbid, more than what we permit.

Kurtapyjama. His face was deeply lined, and his white

There's a truth deeper than experience. It's beyond what we see, or even what we feel. It's an order of truth that separates the profound from the merely clever, and the reality from the perception. We're helpless, usually, in the face of it; and the cost of knowing it, like the cost of knowing love, is sometimes greater than any heart would willingly pay. It doesn't always help us to love the world, but it does prevent us from hating the world. And the only way to know that truth is to share it, from heart to heart, just as Prabhakar told it to me, just as I'm telling it to you now.

Luck is what happens to you when fate gets tired of waiting

The more you try to be like someone else, the more you find yourself standing in the way.

This is not India. There are people here from every part of India, but Bombay isn't India. Bombay is an own-world, a world in itself. The real India is out there.

Lovers find their way by such insights and confidences: they're the stars we use to navigate the ocean of desire. And the brightest of those stars are the heartbreaks and sorrows. The most precious gift you can bring to your lover is your suffering. So I took each sadness she confessed to me, and pinned it to the sky. Somewhere

I detest bullies for their cowardice, and despise them for their cruelty. I never knew a tough man who preyed on the weak. Tough men hate bullies almost as much as bullies hate tough men.

Want it, and that's why I'm going to Khaled and Idriss - because I don't feel sorry for any of it, and I don't regret a thing. I'm cold inside, Lin. I like people, and I like things, but I don't love any of them - not even myself - and I don't really care about them. And, you know, the strange thing is, I don't really wish that I did care.

Sometimes the worst thing you can do to a woman is to love her.

But there's no nation uncorrupted. there's no system that's immune to the misuse of money.

I began to see how deep the well of her loving was, and how much her happiness and confidence depended on drawing that love into the light, and sharing it. And love was beautiful in her. It was a clear sky she gave us with those eyes, and a summer morning with her smile.

Nothing exists as we see it. Nothing we see is really there, as we think we are seeing it. Our eyes are liars. Everything that seems real, is merely part of the illusion. Nothing exists, as we think it does. Not you. Not me. Not this room. Nothing.

Nothing grieves more deeply or pathetically than one half of a great love that isn't meant to be.

Her eyes were the color of the sea if the sea were perfect.

Prisons are the temples where devils learn to prey. Every time we turn the key we twist the knife of fate, because every time we cage a man we close him in with hate.

Out at them, turning this way and that, his face cramped in an expression

You are not a man until you give your love, truly and freely to a child. And you are not a good man until you earn the love, truly and freely, of a child in return.

One of the reasons why we crave love, and seek it so desperately, is that love is the only cure for loneliness, and shame, and sorrow. But some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only loneliness can help you find them again. Some truths about yourself are so painful that only shame can help you live with them. And some things are just so sad that only your soul can do the crying for you.

Some of the worst wrongs, were caused by people who tried to change things.

A wise man once told me- he's a muslim by the way- that he has more in common with a jew than he does a fanatic of his own religion. He has more in common with a rational, reasonable-minded Christian or a Buddhist or Hindu than he does with a fanatic of his own religion. In fact, he has more in common with a ration, reasonable-minded atheist than he does with a fanatic of his own religion

And when you left, I didn't feel anything at all. Not a thing. I didn't want to be forgiven because of what I did. I wanted to be forgiven - and I still

We can deny the past, but we can't escape its torment because the past is a speaking shadow that keeps pace with the truth of what we are, step for step, until we die.

Fanatics always seem to have the same scrubbed and staring look about them. They have the look of people who do not masturbate, but who think about it almost all the time.

You should let Jesus in your heart.' 'Jesus is in every heart, brother.' 'Are you serious?' 'Of course. I love that guy. Who doesn't?' 'A lot of people don't,' he laughed. 'Some people hate Jesus.' 'No. Brilliant mind, loving heart, significant penance: Jesus was the real deal. They might know Christians they don't like, but nobody hates Jesus.

In the face of all that is so wrong with the world, the very worst thing you can do is survive. And yet you must survive. It is this dilemma that makes us believe and cling to the lie that we have a soul, and that there is a God who cares about its fate.

A business suit, Didier once said to me, is nothing but a military uniform, stripped of its honour. And

What is civilisation? Idriss once remarked. It's a woman, free to live as she wants.

No, Lin! This is India. Nobody can take his clothes off, not even to wash his bodies. This is India. Nobody is ever naked in India. And especially, nobody is naked without clothes.

Of course I wanted to know. I was a writer. I wanted to know everything.

A good man is as strong as the right woman needs him to be.

They are often brave, I'm sure, but they are stupid, too, because they give their lives for governments and causes that use their flesh and blood as mere chess pieces. Those governments always betray them or let them down in the long run. Nations neglect no men more shamefully than the heroes of their wars.

Indians are the Italians of Asia and vice versa. Every man in both countries is a singer when he is happy, and every woman is a dancer when she walks to the shop at the corner. For them, food is the music inside the body and music is the food inside the heart. Amore or Pyar makes every man a poet, a princess of peasant girl if only for second eyes of man and woman meets.

Some women cry easily. The tears fall as gently as fragrant raindrops in a sun-shower, and leave the face clear and clean and almost radiant. Other women cry hard, and all the loveliness in them collapses in the agony of it.

I would say that [suffering] is different for all of us, but that it happens when we grow up, when we mature and pass from the childishness of our youthful tears, and become adults. I think that it is a part of growing up, learning to control our suffering. I think that when we grow up, and learn that happiness is rare, and passes quickly, we become disillusioned and hurt. And how much we suffer is a mark of how much we have been hurt by this realisation. Suffering, you see, is a kind of anger. We rage against the unfairness, the injustice of our sad and sorry lot. And this boiling resentment, you see, this anger, is what we call suffering. - Abdul Ghani

The tears, when they come to some men, are worse than beatings. They're wounded worse by sobbing, men like that, than they are by boots and batons. Tears begin in the heart, but some of us deny the heart so often, and for so long, that when it speaks we hear not one but a hundred sorrows in the heartbreak. We know that crying is a good and natural thing. We know that crying isn't a weakness, but a kind of strength. Still, the weeping rips us root by tangled root from the earth, and we crash like fallen trees when we cry.

But I always connected to the people and the purity of their faith, rather than the religious code they followed.

There is another reality, beyond what we see with our eyes. You have to feel your way into that reality with your heart. There is no other way.

Time is a membrane, a connective tissue, and it can be bruised. Time can't heal all wounds:Time is all wounds. Only love and forgiveness heal all wounds

I know now that it's the sweet, sweating smell of hope, which is opposite of hate; and it's the sour, stifled smell of greed, which is the opposite of love.

When I was arrested,' I said, 'I had to undergo a psychiatric evaluation. So, I've actually been certified sane enough to stand trial, which is more than I can say for most of the people I know, including the psychiatrist who certified me. In fact, to get convicted in a court of law, you've gotta be declared sane. Which means that every convict in the world, in a jail cell, is sane, A-Grade and Certified. And with so many people on the outside seeing therapists and counsellors and all, pretty soon the only people who'll be able to prove they're sane will be the people behind bars.

We can't really know what a pleasure it is to run in our own language until we're forced to stumble in someone else's.

But I was alone, and for two reasons: The mafia was theirs, not mine. For them, the organisation always came first. But I was loyal to the men, not the mafia; to the brothers, not the brotherhood. I worked for the mafia, but I didn't join it. I'm not a joiner. I never found a club or clan or idea that was more important to me than the men and women who believed in it.

Do you know the story of the scorpion and the frog? You know, the frog agrees to carry the scorpion across the river, because the scorpion promises not to sting him. And then the scorpion stings the frog, half way across the river. The drowning frog asks him why he did it, when they'll both drown, and the scorpion says that he's a scorpion, and it's his nature to sting.

When we get older - when the steel door slams shut, in one way or another - we know that real suffering is measured by what's taken away from us.

Personality and personal identity are in some ways like co-ordinates on the street map drawn by our intersecting relationships.

The amount of force and violence necessary to board the train, for example was no less and no more than the amoount of politeness and consideration necessary to ensure that the cramped journey was as pleasant as possible afterwards. What is necessary? That was the unspoken but implied, and unavoidable question everywhere in India.

All political systems favour the powerful rich over the defenceless poor.

An amateur is anyone who hasn't learned how not to do it,' I said.

The burden of happiness can only be relieved by the balm of suffering.

I hate it all,' I sighed, sure in my own mind that the new war would change nothing: that wars can't really change things. It's peace that makes the deepest cuts, I thought.

There's no such thing as forever.

It's a characteristic of human nature that the best qualities, called up quickly in a crisis, are very often the hardest to find in a prosperous calm. The contours of all our virtues are shaped by adversity.

Good soldiers are defined by what they can endure, not by what they can inflict.

Love is a one-way street. Love, like respect isn't something you get; it's something you give

It seemed impossible that a modern airport, full of prosperous and purposeful travellers, was only kilometres away from those crushed and cindered dreams. My first impression was that some catastrophe had taken place, and that the slums were refugee camps for the shambling survivors. I learned, months later, that they were survivors, of course, those slum-dwellers: the catastrophes that had driven them to the slums from their villages were poverty, famine, and bloodshed. And five thousand new survivors arrived in the city every week, week after week, year after year. As the kilometres wound

Powerful people have no regrets.

What we tell, is rarely what we do.

Baptised by the sky, the world was born again, and hope washed a year's dust and blood from the mountain.

Once you love something, you can never stop loving it. Even after a divorce, the heart will not stop loving.

Time is the web, and Fate is the spider.

I think that we all, each one of us, we all have to earn our future.

I don't know what scares me more,' she declared, 'the madness that smashes people down, or their ability to endure it.

I'd lost the mark on the psychic map that says 'You Are Here'.

They are not true Marxist, nor true Leninist. The Russians are imperialists.

Didier once told me, in a rambling, midnight dissertation, that a dream is the place where a wish and a fear meet. When the wish and the fear are exactly the same, he said, we call the dream a nightmare.

We can only avoid chaos in the world of human affairs by having an agreed standard for the measure of a unit of morality.

It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured. I realised, somehow, through the screaming of my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them. It doesn't sound like much, I know. But in the flinch and bite of the chain, when it's all you've got, that freedom is an universe of possibility. And the choice you make between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.

The only force more ruthless and cynical than the business of big politics is the politics of big business.

That's how we keep this crazy place together - with the heart. Two hundred fuckin' languages, and a billion people. India is the heart. It's the heart that keeps us together. There's no place with people like my people, Lin. There's no heart like the Indian heart.

Wherever you go in the world, in any society, it is always the same when it comes to questions of justice - We concentrate our laws, investigations, prosecutions, and punishments on how much crime is in the sin, rather than how much sin is in the crime. " - Abdul Khader

Love unlived is a sin against life, and mourning is one of the ways we love. I felt it then, and I let it happen, the longing for him to return. The power in his eyes, and the pride when I did something he admired, and the love in his laugh. The longing: the longing for the lost.

The drums staggered toward the distant street. Moving away from us, the dancers romped and rolled on the rhythm, their swaying heads like a field of wildflowers weaving back and forth on waves of wind. As the music dwindled to an echo in our minds, the day-to-day and minute-to-minute of slum life slowly reclaimed the lanes. We gave ourselves to our routines, our needs, and our harmless, hopeful scheming. And for a while, a little while, ours was a better world because the hearts and smiles that ruled it were almost as pure and clean as the flower petals fluttering from our hair, and clinging to our faces like still, white tears.

The cloak of the past is cut from patches of feeling ,and sewn with rebus threads.Most of the time , the best we can do is wrap it around ourselves for comfort or drag it behind us as we struggle to go on .

Time, too, will die, just as we do, when the universe dies, and is born again. Time's a living thing, just as we are, with birth, longevity, and extinction. Time has a heartbeat, but it isn't ours, no matter how much of ourselves we sacrifice to it. We don't need Time. Time needs us. Even Time loves company.

He'd been trying to tell me that every human will has the power to transform its fate. I'd always

The truth is a bully we all pretend to like

A man is truly a man when he wins the love of a good woman, earns her respect, and keeps her trust. Until you can do that, you're not a man.

There's a truth that's deeper than experience. It's beyond what we see, or even what we feel. It's an order of truth that separates the profound from the merely clever, and the reality from the perception.

Love is the opposite of power. That's why we fear it so much.

Credit, security passes, and other documents. It was a booming trade in the booming economy of Bombay, and we often worked through the dawn to satisfy the demand. And the business was generational: as licensing authorities and other bodies

Silences can wound as surely as the twisting lash.

Some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only loneliness can help you find them again. Some truths are so painful that only shame can help you live with them. Some things are so sad that only your soul can do the crying for them.

There are no mistakes. Only new paths to explore.