While the foods were being prepared, I watched as men dragged a foot-operated grinding wheel into an open space, and the groom devoted a tense hour to putting a razor's edge to a large, ornate dagger. The bride's father watched that effort with a critical eye. After satisfying himself that the weapon was suitably lethal, he gravely accepted it as a gift from the younger man. The groom has just sharpened the knife that the bride's father will use on him, if he ever mistreats the girl.

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

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

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

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 won't stop loving them, even after they're dead and gone.

You can never tell what people have inside them until you start taking it away, one hope at a time

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.