Shantaram

by Gregory David Roberts

Fate needs accomplices, and the stones in destiny’s walls are mortared with small and heedless complicities such as those.

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

What we call cowardice is often just another name for being taken by surprise, and courage is seldom any better than simply being well prepared.

It’s unreasonable and unjustified, of course, but it’s always there, hiding in the long shadow thrown by envy.

You can be happy and afraid and angry in your dreams, but you have to be wide awake to be sad, don’t you think?’

Sometimes, in India, you have to surrender before you win.’

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.

no happiness exists without its woe, no wealth without its cost, and no life without its full measure, sooner or later, of sorrowing and death.

It’s a fact of life on the run that you often love more people than you trust.

We can compel men not to be bad, but we cannot compel them to be good, don’t you find?

Sometimes the lion must roar, just to remind the horse of his fear.

‘because justice is a judgement that is both fair and forgiving. Justice is not done until everyone is satisfied,

A politician is someone who promises you a bridge, even when there’s no river.’

In fact, I often find myself thinking first in English, before other languages.

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

If we do not suffer with our pain, then we have not learned about anything but ourselves.

There was a plan or purpose. I sensed it. There were clues, I was sure, but I couldn’t separate them from the busy collage of hours and faces and words.

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.

News tells you what people did. Gossip tells you how much they enjoyed it.’

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

India is a nation of singers whose first love is the kind of song we turn to when crying just isn’t enough.

Evil is the root of all money. There’s no such thing as clean money.

There is only love, you know, in the whole world. There is only 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.’

all politicians are ruthless and corrupt, and all political systems favour the powerful rich over the defenceless poor. And in time, and in a sense, I began to share their view because I knew the experience in which it was grounded. Prison had given us an intimate acquaintance with human-rights violations, and every day the courts confirmed what we’d learned about the law: the rich in any country, and any system, always got the best justice money could buy.

We can deny the past, but we can’t escape its torment because the past is a speaking shadow that keeps pace with the truth of what we are, step for step, until we die.

I didn’t know then that good soldiers are defined by what they can endure, not by what they can inflict.

They claim a hidden corner of our hearts, all those moments that stay with us unscreamed.

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.

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.

‘Some people always manage to make us feel sorry for them, no matter how stupid and angry we feel about it after.

she said, ‘that a good man is as strong as the right woman needs him to be.’

Jealousy, like the flawed love that bears it, has no respect for time or space or wisely reasoned argument.

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.

The same doorway that leads us into and out of a room also leads us into the past of the room and its ceaselessly unfolding future.

Fate always gives you two choices, Scorpio George once said: the one you should take, and the one you do.