Gregory David Roberts Quotes

Heroes only come in three kinds:dead, damaged or dubious.

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

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

I look back, now, and I know that the naming moment, which seemed so insignificant then, which seemed to demand no more than an arbitrary and superstitious yes or no, was in fact a pivotal moment in my life.

Its a fact of being in love that we often pay no attention whatsoever to the substance of what a lover says, while being intoxicated to ecstasy by the way it's said. I was in love with her eyes, but I didn't read them. I loved her voice, but I didn't really hear the fear & the anguish in it.

Some things are just so sad that only your soul can do the crying for you.

The choking humidity makes amphibians of us all, in Bombay, breathing water in air; you learn to live with it, and you learn to like it, or you leave.

A politician is someone who promises a bridge even when there's no water

The truth is that, no matter what kind of game you find yourself in, no matter how good or bad the luck, you can change your life completely with a single thought or a single act of love

Fate always gives you two choices, the one you should take, and the one you do.

And money, if the pile gets high enough, is something like a big political party: it does as much harm as it does good, it puts too much power in too few hands, and the closer you come to it the dirtier you get.

Every virtuous act is inspired by a dark secret.

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.

There's a kind of luck that's not much more than being in the right place at the right time, a kind of inspiration that's not much more than doing the right thing in the right way, and both only really happen to you when you empty your heart of ambition, purpose, and plan; when you give yourself, completely, to the golden, fate-filled moment.

A lot of bad stuff in the world wasn’t really that bad until someone tried to change it.

When the wish and the fear are exactly the same, we call the dream a nightmare.

If you could be happy, really happy, for just a while, but you knew from the start that it would end in sadness, and bring pain afterwards, would you choose to have that happiness or would you avoid it?

Optimism is the first cousin of love, and it's exactly like love in three ways: it's pushy, it has no real sense of humour, and it turns up where you least expect it.

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

It doesnt always help us to love the world,but it does prevent us from hating the world.

Fanatics have the look of people who do not masturbate but who think about it almost all time.

Cowardece is often just another name for being taken by surprise.

Ask people for help. You'll be all right. Don't worry. It's a great adventure, your life, and it has only just begun.

Shantaram is the second in the series of a quartet of novels that I have planned about my life but is the first to be written. The third book is a sequel to Shantaram, the first a prequel.

I know now that when the loving, honest moment comes it should be seized, and spoken, because it may never come again. And unvoiced, unmoving, unlived in the things we declare form heart to heart, those true and real feelings wither and crumble in the remembering hand that tries too late to reach for them.

Men reveal what they think when they look away, and what they feel when they hesitate. With women, it's the other way around

But I smiled, and smiling was easy, no matter how strange and disorienting the street seemed to be. I was a fugitive. I was a wanted man, a hunted man, with a price on my head. And I was still one step ahead of them. I was free. Every day, when you're on the run, is the whole of your life. Every free minute is a short story with a happy ending.

Every virtuous act has some Dark secret in its heart; every risk we take contains a mystery that can’t be solved.

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.

Justice is a judgement that is both fair and forgiving. Justice is not done until everyone is satisfied, even those who offend us and must be punished by us. You can see, by what we have done with these two boys, that justice is not only the way we punish those who do wrong. It is also the way we try to save them.

Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope. Sometimes we cry with everything except tears. In the end that’s all there is: love and its duty, sorrow and its truth. In the end that’s all we have - to hold on tight until the dawn

It isn't a secret, unless keeping it hurts.

There are no mistakes. Only new paths to explore.

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

Powerful people have no regrets.

The only power that has any real meaning is the power to better the world.

We live on because we can love, and we love because we can forgive.

One of the ironies of courage, and the reason why we prize it so highly, is that we find it easier to be brave for someone else than we do for ourselves alone.

But in a way you can say that after leaving the sea, after all those millions of years of living inside of the sea, we took the ocean with us. When a woman makes a baby, she gives it water, inside her body, to grow in. That water inside her body is almost exactly the same as the water of the sea. It is salty, by just the same amount. She makes a little ocean, in her body. And not only this. Our blood and our sweating, they are both salty, almost exactly like the water from the sea is salty. We carry oceans inside of us, in our blood and our sweat. And we are crying the oceans, in our tears.

at first, when we truly love someone, our greatest fear is that the loved one will stop loving us. what we should fear and dread, of course, is that we wont stop loving them, even after they are dead and gone. for i still love you with the whole of my heart. i still love you. and sometimes, my friend, the love that i have and cant give to you, crushed the breast from my chest. soemtimes, even now, my heart is drowning in a sorrow that has no stars without you, and no laughter, and no sleep.

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

Crime is stupid, lazy and weak. You can only exploit it and make money out of it.

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.

Let me explain something to you. Look around here. How many people do you count? Sixty, eighty, eighty people? Greeks, Germans, Italians, French, Americans. Tourists from everywhere. Eating, drinking, talking, laughing. And from Bombay - Indians and Iranians and Afghans and Arabs and Africans. But how many of these people have real power, real destiny, real dynamic for their place, and their time, and the lives of thousand of people? I will tell you - four. Four people in this room with power, and the rest are like the rest of the people everywhere: powerless, sleepers in the dream.

What is it?" she asked. "I'm looking for your wings. You are my guardian angel, aren't you?" "I'm afraid not," she replied, her cheeks dimplingwith a wry smile. "There's too much of the devil in me for that." "Just how much devil," I grinned, "are we talking about here?

The voice, Afghan matchmakers say, is more than half of love.

Anything that can be put in a nut shell should remain there.

justice is not only the way we punish those who do wrong. It is also the way we try to save them.