Gregory David Roberts Quotes

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.

But the soul has no culture. The soul has no nations. The soul has no colour or accent or way of life. The soul is forever. The soul is one. And when the heart has its moment of truth and sorrow, the soul can't be stilled.

Oh, of course, naturally, God is impossible. That is the first proof that he exists." 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.

Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope. Sometimes we cry with everything except tears.

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

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 .

For all his wisdom, he did not know that love cannot be tested. Honesty can be tested and loyalty. But there is not test for love. Love goes on forever, once it begins, even if we come to hate the one we love. Love goes on forever because love is born in the part of us that does not die.

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.

A city may be dirty on the outside but is clean on the inside. Many cities in the world are clean on the outside but dirty on the inside.

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.

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

The best revenge, like the best sex, is performed slowly, and with the eyes open.

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.

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

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.

They claim a hidden corner of our hearts, all those moments that stay with us unscreamed. That's where loves, like elephants, drag themselves to die. It's the place where pride allows itself to cry.

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

You know the difference between news and gossip, don't you? News tells you what people did. Gossip tells you how much they enjoyed it.

The most precious gift you can bring to your lover is your suffering.

If we can't respect the way we earn it, money has no value. If we can't use it to make life better for our families and loved ones, money has no purpose.

I think the novel form chose me. I was a writer before I became a criminal... my first instinct was to write.

Fate gives all of us three teachers, three friends, three enemies, and three great loves in our lives. But these twelve are always disguised, and we can never know which one is which until we’ve loved them, left them, or fought them.

Never let anyone know what you're thinking - always know what the other thinks of you.

Sooner or later, fate puts us together with all the people, one by one, who show us what we could, and shouldn’t, let ourselves become. Sooner or later we meet the drunkard, the waster, the betrayer, the ruthless mind, and the hate-filled heart. But fate loads the dice, of course, because we usually find ourselves loving or pitying almost all of those people. And it’s impossible to despise someone you honestly pity, and to shun someone you truly love.

A man has to find a good woman, and when he finds her he has to win her love. then he has to earn her respect. then he has to cherish her trust. and then he has to, like, go on doing that for as long as they live. Until they both die. That's what it's all about. That's the most important thing in the world. That's what a man is, Yaar. A man is truly a man when he wins the love of a good woman, earns her respect, and keeps her trust. Until you do that, you're not a man.

I still love you. And sometimes, my friend, the love that I have, and can't give to you, crushes the breath from my chest. Sometimes, even now, my heart is drowning in a sorrow that has no stars without you, and no laughter, and no sleep.

Be true to love where ever you find it, and be true to yourself and everything that you really are.

The truth is a bully we all pretend to like

Every life, every love, every action and feeling and thought has its reason and significance: its beginning, and the part it plays in the end. Sometimes, we do see.

Because my life has been so notorious and so bad, it can overshadow my work.

Some loves are like that. Your heart starts to feel like an overcrowded lifeboat. You throw your pride out to keep it afloat, & your self-respect & independence. After a while you start throwing people out - friends, everyone you know. & it's still not enough. The lifeboat is still sinking, & you know it's going to take you down with it. I've seen that happen to a lot of people. I think that's why I'm sick of love. - Karla

Friendship is also a kind of medicine, and the markets for it, too, are sometimes black.

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

when you judge the power that is in a person, you must judge their capacities as both friend and as enemy.

The touch was exactly what the touch of a lover's hand should be: familiar, yet exciting as a whispered promise. I felt an almost irresistible urge to take her hand and place it flat against my chest, near my heart. Maybe I should've done it. I know now that she would've laughed, if I'd done it, and she would've liked me for it. But strangers that we were then, we stood for five long seconds and held the stare, while all the parallel worlds, all the parallel lives that might've been, and never would be, whirled around us.

We carry oceans inside of us, in our blood and our sweat. And we are crying the oceans, in our tears.

Sometimes, you have to surrender before you win.

Praising people behind their back is monstrously unfair, because the one thing you can't defend yourself against is the good that people say about you.

Some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only loneliness can help you find them again.

Friendship is an Algebra test that nobody passes.

Poverty and pride are devoted blood brothers until one, always and inevitably, kills the other.

There's no believing in God...We either know God, or we don't.

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.

There's a theory that snoring at night in sleep is a subconscious defence reflex-a warning sound that frightened potential predators away from the mouth of the cave when our lower-paleolithic ancestors huddled in vulnerable sleep. That group of nomads, cameleers, sheep and goat herders, farmers, and guerilla fighters lent credibility to the idea, for they snored so thunderously and with such persistent ferocity through the long, cold night that they would've frightened a pride of ravenous lions into scattering like startled mice.

Sometimes you have to lose to win

Happiness is a myth. It was invented to make us buy new things.

Whatever you do, in the privacy of your own rain shower, is your own business

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.