Shantaram

by Gregory David Roberts

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

‘Some people do that,’ I said, smiling at the anger in her because I felt it myself. ‘Some people always manage to make us feel sorry for them, no matter how stupid and angry we feel about it after. They’re the canaries, kind of, in the coalmines of our hearts. If we stop feeling sorry for them, when they let us down, we’re in deep trouble.

But sometimes the worst thing you can do to a woman is to love her.

MEN WAGE WARS for profit and principle, but they fight them for land and women.

I wish now that I didn’t say it. Of the hundred things that I wish I’d never said or done in my wicked life, that little quirk of honesty is right up there, near the top of the list.

strong men make the luck to happen,’

But hunger has a will of its own, a will that’s much older than the other will we praise and flatter in the palace of the mind.

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

I love money, Didier once said to me, but I hate the smell of it. The more happiness I get from it, the more thoroughly I have to wash my hands afterwards.

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

chest. It is always a fool’s mistake, Didier once said to me, to be alone with someone you shouldn’t have loved.