Shantaram Quotes

“My first impression was that a catastrophe had struck; those must have been refugee camps for survivors devastated by the disaster. Months later, I learned that the slum dwellers were indeed survivors: the catastrophes that had driven them from their villages were poverty, famine, and massacres. Every week, five thousand new survivors arrived in the city, week after week, year after year.”
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

“There is no such thing as a trivial choice. That is why so many powerful people try to influence all our choices,”
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram / The Mountain Shadow

“People say that money is the root of all evil,’ Khaled told me when we met in his apartment. His English was rich with accents of New York and Arabic and the Hindi that he spoke reasonably well. ‘But it’s not true. It’s the other way round. Money isn’t the root of all evil. Evil is the root of all money. There’s no such thing as clean money. All the money in the world is dirty, in some way, because there’s no clean way to make it. If you get paid in money, somebody, somewhere, is suffering for it. That’s one of the reasons, I think, why just about everybody—even people who’d neve break the law in any other way—is happy to add an extra buck or two to their money on the black market.”
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram - 1. osa