Quotes from 'Shantaram' by Gregory David Roberts

And the choice you make, between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.

The past reflects between two mirrors - the bright mirror of words and deeds, and the dark one, full of things we didn't do or say.

Love is the opposite of power. That's why we fear it so much.

A dream is the place where a wish and fear meet. When the fear and wish are exactly the same, we call the dream a nightmare.

There is no act of faith more beautiful than the generosity of the very poor.

The sane man is simply a better liar than the insane man.

I think that when we grow up, and learn that happiness is rare, and passes quickly, we become, disillusioned and hurt. And how much we suffer is a mark of how much we have been hurt by this realization. Suffering is a mark of how much we have been hurt by this realisation. Suffering you see is a kind of anger. We rage against the unfairness, the injustice of our sad sorry lot. And this boiling resentment, you see, this anger, is what we call suffering.

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 it's duty, sorrow and it's truth. In the end that's all we have - to hold on tight until the dawn.

News tells you what people did. Gossip tells you how much they enjoyed it.

The contours of all our virtues are shaped by adversity.

It's not just the body that must survive: the spirit and the will and the heart have to make it through as well. If any one of them is broken or destroyed, the man whose living body walks through the gate, can't be said to have survived.

If you make your heart into a weapon, you always end up using it on yourself.

If we all learned what we should learn, the first time around, we wouldn't need love at all.

A fanatic is someone who won't change his mind and can't change the subject.

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. For I still love you with the whole of my heart. I still love you. And sometimes, the love that I have, and can't give to you, crushes the breath from my chest. Sometimes, even now, my heart is drowning in a sorrow that has no stars without you, and no laughter, and no sleep.

A good man is as strong as the right woman needs him to be.

You can't kill love. You can't even kill it with hate. You can kill in-love, and loving, and even loveliness. You can kill them all, or numb them into dense, leaden regret, but you can't kill love itself. Love is the passionate search for a truth other than your own; and once you feel it, honestly and completely, love is forever.

The sorrowing I'd shunned had taken so long to find me because I couldn't let him go.

All of the powerful men I knew were afraid, and cruel. That is the...mix...that gave them power over other men.

When we do hate, it is with the whole of the soul, and it can never forgive the hated one.

Silences can wound as surely as the twisting lash, but sometimes, being silent is the only way to tell the truth.

The cloak of the past is cut from patches of feeling, and sewn with rebus threads. Most of the time, the best we can do is wrap it around ourselves for comfort or drag is behind us as we struggle to go on. But, everything has it's cause and meaning. Every life, every love, every action and feeling and thought has it's reason and significance: its beginning, and the part it plays in the end.

Nothing in any life, no matter how well or poorly lived, is wiser than failure or clearer than sorrow. And in the tiny, precious wisdom they gave to us, even those dread and hated enemies, suffering and failure, have their reason and right to be.

The smell of money was like the sweat and dirt on a gravedigger's boots.

The only power that has any real meaning is the power to better the world.

Anger softened into sorrow, as it always does, as it always must. And no part of what we'd wanted, just an hour's life before, was as rich in hope or meaning as a single teardrop's fall.

Every human heartbeat is a universe of possibilities,

No matter what kind of game you find yourself in, no matter how good or bad the luck, you can change your life completely with a single thought or a single act of love.
 
Music: WildLife 'On The Heart'