Shantaram

by Gregory David Roberts

There is no objective and universally acceptable definition of good and evil. And until we have one, we will go on justifying our own actions, while condemning the actions of the others.’

So the universe is moving along toward God, or toward some Ultimate Complexity. Anything that helps it along is good. Anything that holds it back is evil. That still leaves me with the problem of who judges the evil. How do we know? How do we tell whether any one thing we do will get us there or hold us back?’

I hesitated. Karla once said that men reveal what they think when they look away, and what they feel when they hesitate. With women, she said, it’s the other way around.

Happiness is a myth, Karla once said. It was invented to make us buy things.

When you’re sober and fit, it’s the world that’s fucked.’

We have a drive for power because power gives us sex, and we have a drive for meaning because that helps us to understand sex. It all comes down to sex in the end, no matter what you call it. Those other ideas, they’re just the clothes, like. And when you get the clothes off, it’s all about sex, innit?’

‘We’re all driven by a desire to find meaning in life. We have to know what it’s all about. If it was just sex or power we’d still be chimpanzees. It’s meaning that makes us human beings.’

it’s meaning that makes us human.

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

Ye doonia, ye mehfil Mere kam, ki nahi . . . All the world, all its people Mean nothing to me . . .

‘But I do believe in love. Everyone believes in love.’

‘People haven’t stopped believing in love. They haven’t stopped wanting to be in love. They just don’t believe in a happy ending anymore. They still believe in love, and falling in love, but they know now that . . . they know that romances almost never end as well as they begin.’

It’s very . . . it’s a very hard thing to resist, real goodness, in a tough man.

‘No political philosophy I ever heard of loves the human race as much as anarchism. Every other way of looking at the world says that people have to be controlled, and ordered around, and governed. Only the anarchists trust human beings enough to let them work it out for themselves.

It’s a fact of being in love that we often pay no attention whatsoever to the substance of what a lover says, while being intoxicated to ecstasy by the way it’s said.

‘Nobody gets what they want,’ she said, ‘Nobody does. Nobody.’

There’s a difference between a choice and an ultimatum: a choice means that you know what’s going on, and why, before you decide.

do you think that one great act of genius can allow us to forgive the hundred flaws and failures that bring it into being?’

But the lies we tell ourselves are the ghosts that haunt the empty house of midnight.

Millions of dreams were born there, around us, every day. Millions of dreams died there, and were born again.

depression only happens to people who don’t know how to be sad.’

There are many animals that can express their happiness, but only the human animal has the genius to express a magnificent sadness.

For all his wisdom, he did not know that love cannot be tested. Honesty can be tested, and loyalty. But there is no 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.’

Karla was gone, and there was no way to find her. And every day I woke with a dream or a thought of her. Every night I slept with the knife of regret in my chest.

‘In order to know about any act or intention or consequence, we must first ask two questions. One, what would happen if everyone did this thing? Two, would this help or hinder the movement toward complexity?’

A man trusts another man when he sees enough of himself in him, I guess. Or maybe when he sees the things he wishes he had in himself.’

every virtuous act is inspired by a dark secret.

What I do know now, and didn’t know then is that, in the long run, motive matters more with good deeds than it does with bad. When all the guilt and shame for the bad we’ve done have run their course, it’s the good we did that can save us. But then, when salvation speaks, the secrets we kept, and the motives we concealed, creep from their shadows. They cling to us, those dark motives for our good deeds. Redemption’s climb is steepest if the good we did is soiled with secret shame.

The effect, no matter how skilfully achieved, is always born in the artist’s intuition. And intuition can’t be taught.

There was a hollowness in his eyes: a black hole of shocked grieving that swallowed all the questions and released no answers.

his young face assumed a numb expression. I knew that expression. I sometimes caught it, by chance, in the mirror: the way we look when the part of happiness that’s trusting and innocent is ripped away, and we blame ourselves, rightly or wrongly, for its loss.

It’s said that you can never go home again, and it’s true enough, of course. But the opposite is also true. You must go back, and you always go back, and you can never stop going back, no matter how hard you try.

But there was nowhere to go: nowhere that wasn’t emptied of meaning and identity and love by the vacuum of those who were missing and lost forever.

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.

If the killer-type begins to lose the fight, his reason for fighting it fades. If the survivor-type begins to lose, his reason for fighting it flares up fiercer than ever.

The simple fact is that fighting to save a life is a better and more enduring reason than fighting to end one.

because if we all learned what we should learn, the first time round, we wouldn’t need love at all.

The fully mature man or woman, he said, has about two seconds left to live.

Pity is the one part of love that asks for nothing in return and, because of that, every act of pity is a kind of prayer. And dead men demand prayers.

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

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

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.

Everything you ever sense, in touch or taste or sight or even thought, has an effect on you that’s greater than zero.

if we envy someone for all the right reasons, we’re half way to wisdom.

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.

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,

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.’

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.

A mujaheddin fighter once told me that 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.

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.