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Civilisation, after all, is defined by what we forbid, more than what we permit.’
a friend is anyone you don’t despise.’
The truth is a bully we all pretend to like.
Shantaram, which means man of peace, or man of God’s peace.
‘What I am saying is that reality—as you see it, and as most people see it—is nothing more than an illusion. There is another reality, beyond what we see with our eyes. You have to feel your way into that reality with your heart. There is no other way.’
justice is not only the way we punish those who do wrong. It is also the way we try to save them.’
I sometimes think that the size of our happiness is inversely proportional to the size of our house.’
suffering is happiness, backwards—to hook a fish of memory.
we know that real suffering is measured by what’s taken away from us.
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.
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.’
News tells you what people did. Gossip tells you how much they enjoyed it.’
It’s a characteristic of human nature that the best qualities, called up quickly in a crisis, are very often the hardest to find in a prosperous calm.
Someone told me once that if you make your heart into a weapon, you always end up using it on yourself.’
I began to sing an old, sad, and much-loved song from a Hindi movie. Ye doonia, ye mehfil Mere kam, ki nahi… All the world, all its people Mean nothing to me …
if we envy someone for all the right reasons, we’re half way to wisdom.
Winston Churchill, who once defined a fanatic as someone who won’t change his mind and can’t change the subject.’
There are three things that no Indian man can resist: a beautiful face, a beautiful song, and an invitation to dance.
No love, is no life.
Some people have told me that the people of Scotland are pessimists, who prefer to walk on the dark side of every sunny street.
interested in everything and committed to nothing.
assassin grief, he’d once called it: the kind of grief that lies in wait and attacks from ambush, with no warning and no mercy.
THE WORD MAFIA comes from the Sicilian word for bragging. And if you ask any serious man who commits serious crimes for a living, he’ll tell you it’s just that—the boasting, the pride—that gets most of us in the end. But we never learn. Maybe it’s not possible to break laws without boasting about it to someone. Maybe it’s not possible to be an outlaw without being proud in some way. Certainly, in those last months of the old mafia, the brotherhood that Khaderbhai had designed, steered, and ruled, there was plenty of boasting and no less pride. But it was the last time that any of us in that
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‘Luck is what happens to you when fate gets tired of waiting,’
Every human heartbeat, he’d said many times, is a universe of possibilities.
