We have a saying in Marseilles: a man in no hurry gets nowhere fast. I have been in no hurry for eight years.

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

The only victory that really counts in prison is survival. But survival means more than simply being alive. It's not just the body that must survive a jail term; the spirit and the will and the heart have to make it through as well. If any one of them is broken or destroyed, the man whose living body walks through the gate, at the end of his sentence, can't be said to have survived it. And it's for those small victories of the heart, and the spirit, and the will that we sometimes risk the body that cradles 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.

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

The choice you make, between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.

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.