Gregory David Roberts Quotes

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

Indian actors know how to shout with the eyes.

I take everything personally- that's what being a person is all about.

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.

you can't kill love. you can't even kill it with hate. you can kill in-love, and loving, and even loveliness. you can kill them all, or numb them into dense, leaden regret, but you can't kill love itself. love is the passionate search for a truth other than your own; and once you feel it, honestly and completely, love is forever. every act of love, every moment of the heart reaching out, is a part of the universal good: it's a part of God, or what we call God, and it can never die.

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.\

People say that love is the best thing in the world not power. But they are wrong. Love is the opposite of power and that's why we fear it so much.

Glory belongs to God, of course; that's what the word really means. And you can't serve God with a gun.

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.

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.

It's forgiveness that makes us what we are. Without forgiveness, our species would've annihilated itself in endless retributions. Without forgiveness, there would be no history. Without that hope, there would be no art, for every work of art is in some way an act of forgiveness. Without that dream, there would be no love, for every act of love is in some way a promise to forgive. We live on because we can love, and we love because we can forgive.

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

While I was chained to a wall and being tortured, I realized, 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 a universe of possibility. And the choice you make between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.

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

So when will be the time to get on the train? I think.....a little bit almost quite very soon and not long.

If you make your heart into a weapon, you end up using it on yourself.

every human heart beat is a universe of possibilities.

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

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

I think the future is like anything else that's important. It has to be earned. If we don't earn it, we don't have a future at all. And if we don't earn it, we don't deserve it, we have to live in the present, more or less forever. Or worse, we have to live in the past. I think that's probably what love is - a way of earning the future.

Friendship is something that gets harder to understand, every damn year of my life.Friendship is like a kind of algebra test that nobody passes. In my worst moods, I think the best you can say is that a friend is anyone you don't despise.

There's no such thing as forever.

There’s too much love in the world. Sometimes I think that’s what heaven is---- a place where everybody’s happy because nobody loves anybody else, ever.

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

hate has no literature: real fear and real hate have no words

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.

The simple and astonishing truth about India and Indian people is that when you go there, and deal with them, your heart always guides you more wisely than your head. There's nowhere else in the world where that's quite so true.

I sometimes think that the size of our happiness is inversely proportional to the size of our house.

A man trusts another man when he sees enough of himself in him.

I don't know what frightens me more, the power that crushes us, or our endless ability to endure it.

I don't know what frightens me more

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

Food is music to the body, music is food to the heart.

There's no heart like the Indian heart.

Suffering is how we test our love especially our love for God.

The contrast between the familiar and the exceptional was everywhere around me. A bullock cart was drawn up beside a modern sports car at a traffic signal. A man squatted to relieve himself behind the discreet shelter of a satellite dish. An electric forklift truck was being used to unload goods from an ancient wooden cart with wooden wheels. The impression was of a plodding indefatigable and distant past that had crashed intact through barriers of time into its own future. I liked it.

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

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

One, what would happen if everyone did this thing? Two, would this help or hinder the movement toward universal ultimate complexity?

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.

That's how they manage to live together, a billion of them, in reasonable peace. They are not perfect, of course. They know how to fight and lie and cheat each other, and all the things that all of us do. But more than any other people in the world, the Indians know how to love one another.

I went to war. .... I survived, while other men around me died. ... men whose lives were crunched up in mistakes, and thrown away by the wrong second of someone else's hate, or love, or indifference.

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.

Nothing in the world is so soft and pleasing to the touch, as the skin of a woman's thigh. No flower, feather or fabric, can match that velvet whisper of flesh. No matter how unequal they may be in any other ways, all women, old and young, fat and thin, beautiful and ugly, have that perfection. It's a great part of the reason why men hunger to possess women, and so often convince themselves that they do possess them: the thigh, that touch.

The real trick in life is to want nothing, and to succeed in getting it. - Karla

The man grinned back at me with that perfect sincerity we fear and call simple-minded.

Silence is the tortured man's revenge.

There is no man, and no place, without war. The only thing we can do is choose a side, and fight. That is the only choice we get - who we fight for, who we fight against. That is life.