Shaambhavi’s Reviews > Shantaram > Status Update

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 here not one but hundred sorrows in the heartbreak.

Because they are Indians, man. That's how we keep this crazy place together - with the heart. Two hundred fuckin' languages, and a billion people. India is the heart. It's the heart that keeps us together. There is no place with people like my people, Lin. There's no heart like the Indian heart.

Guilt is the hilt of the knife that we use on ourselves, and love is often the blade; but it's very that keeps the knife sharp, and worry that gets most of us, in the end.

One of the ironies of courage, and the reason why we prize it so highly, is that we find it easier to be brave for someone else than we do for ourselves alone.

It isn't cruelty or shame that characterizes the human race, it's forgiveness that makes us who we are. We live because we can love, and we love because we can forgive.