Gregory David Roberts

“Friendship is something that gets harder to understand, every damn year of my life.Friendship is like a kind of algebra test that nobody passes. In my worst moods, I think the best you can say is that a friend is anyone you don't despise.”

“I know now that it's the sweet, sweating smell of hope, which is opposite of hate; and it's the sour, stifled smell of greed, which is the opposite of love.”

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

“Jealousy, like the flawed love that bears it, has no respect for time or space or wisely reasoned argument. Jealousy can raise the dead with a single, spiteful taunt, or hate a perfect stranger for nothing more than the sound of his name.”

“Its 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. I was in love with her eyes, but I didn't read them. I loved her voice, but I didn't really hear the fear & the anguish in it.”

“There is an element of control we have over suffering.”

“The end mirrors the beginning. In the end, its about a woman & a city.”

“Anything that can be put in a nutshell, should remain there.”

“If you stare into its cold dead eye, the camera always mocks you with the truth.”

“When the heart has its moment of truth & sorrow, the soul can't be stilled.”

“None of us lie or guard our secrets when we sing, and India is a nation of singers whose first love is the kind of song we turn to when crying just isn’t enough.”

“Fear dries a man’s mouth, and hate strangles him. That’s why hate has no great literature: real fear and real hate have no words.”

“I heard a warning, deep within - we usually do , when something worse than we can imagine is stalking us, and set to pounce. Fate’s way of beating us in a fair fight is to give us warnings that we hear, but never heed.”

“Waiting for nothing, that is what kills the heart of a man, isn’t it?”

“Every door is a portal leading through time as well as space. The same doorway that leads us into and out of a room also leads us into the past of the room and its ceaselessly unfolding future.”

“Remember,' Khader said insistently, resting his hand on my forearm to emphasise his words. 'Sometimes it is necessary to do the wrong thing for the right reasons. The important thing is to be sure that our reasons are right, and that we admit the wrong--that we do not lie to ourselves, and convince ourselves that what we do is right.”

“He was the little mouse that I'd trained and fed with crumbs in my prison cell; the mouse that was crucified.”

“The strength and wildness and will that I found in him were more and better than all the truth and goodness in the world. I pledged myself to him as brother and friend no matter what he'd done and no matter what he was.”

“It's such a huge arrogance to love someone, and there's too much of it around. There's too much love in this world. Sometimes I think that's what heavens is-- a place where everybody's happy because nobody loves anybody else, ever.”

“A man opposite me shifted his feet, accidentally brushing his foot against mine. It was a gentle touch, barely noticeable, but the man immediately reached out to touch my knee and then his own chest with the fingertips of his right hand, in the Indian gesture of apology for an unintended offence. In the carriage and the corridor beyond, the other passengers were similarly respectful, sharing, and solicitous with one another. At first, on that first journey out of the city into India, I found such sudden politeness infuriating after the violent scramble to board the train. It seemed hypocritical for them to show such deferential concern over a nudge with a foot when, minutes before, they'd all but pushed one another out of the windows. Now, long years and many journeys after that first ride on a crowded rural train, I know that the scrambled fighting and courteous deference were both expressions of the one philosophy: the doctrine of necessity. The amount of force and violence necessary to board the train, for example, was no less and no more than the amount of politeness and consideration necessary to ensure that the cramped journey was as pleasant as possible afterwards. What is necessary! That was the unspoken but implied and unavoidable question everywhere in India. When I understood that, a great many of the characteristically perplexing aspects of public life became comprehensible: from the acceptance of sprawling slums by city authorities, to the freedom that cows had to roam at random in the midst of traffic; from the toleration of beggars on the streets, to the concatenate complexity of the bureaucracies; and from the gorgeous, unashamed escapism of Bollywood movies, to the accommodation of hundreds of thousands of refugees from Tibet, Iran, Afghanistan, Africa, and Bangladesh, in a country that was already too crowded with sorrows and needs of its own. The real hypocrisy, I came to realise, was in the eyes and minds and criticisms of those who came from lands of plenty, where none had to fight for a seat on a train. Even on that first train ride, I knew in my heart that Didier had been right when he'd compared India and its billion souls to France. I had an intuition, echoing his thought, that if there were a billion Frenchmen or Australians or Americans living in such a small space, the fighting to board the train would be much more, and the courtesy afterwards much less. And in truth, the politeness and consideration shown by the peasant farmers, travelling salesmen, itinerant workers, and returning sons and fathers and husbands did make for an agreeable journey, despite the cramped conditions and relentlessly increasing heat. Every available centimetre of seating space was occupied, even to the sturdy metal luggage racks over our heads. The men in the corridor took turns to sit or squat on a section of floor that had been set aside and cleaned for the purpose. Every man felt the press of at least two other bodies against his own. Yet there wasn't a single display of grouchiness or bad temper”

“A young man didn't bring flowers or chocolates to the woman he loved: He brought her stories from the wider world, where men grappled with demons of desire, and monstrous injustice.”

“Heaped up on the blankets, our bodies bound by weariness and her deep slumber, surrounded by sickness and hope, death and defiance, I touched the soft surrendered curl of Karla's sleeping fingers to my lips, and I pledged my heart to her forever.”

“The real trick in life is to want nothing, and to succeed in getting it.- Karla”

“A lot of bad stuff in the world wasn’t really that bad until someone tried to change it.”

“Every human heartbeat, he's said many times, is a universe of possibilities.”

“Slowly, desolately, the fist of what we'd done unclenched the clawed palm of what we'd become.”

“I know now that when the loving, honest moment comes it should be seized, and spoken, because it may never come again. And unvoiced, unmoving, unlived in the things we declare form heart to heart, those true and real feelings wither and crumble in the remembering hand that tries too late to reach for them.”

“Every life, every love, every action and feeling and thought has its reason and significance: its beginning, and the part it plays in the end. Sometimes, we do see.”

“Silences can wound as surely as the twisting lash.”

“I was sure there had to be a pay-off, somehow, and I kept waiting for it. I didn't know then, as I do now, that love's a one-way street. Love, like respect, isn't something you get; it's something you give.”

“Personality and personal identity are in some ways like co-ordinates on the street map drawn by our intersecting relationships.”

“Most of us pretend, with greater or lesser success, that the minute we live in is something we can share. But the past for every one of us is a desert island.”

“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.”

“Motive matters more with good deeds than it does with bad.”

“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.”

“The most precious gift you can bring to your lover is your suffering.”

“There's no meanness too spiteful or too cruel, Didier once said to me, when we hate someone for all the wrong reasons.”

“I think that it is a part of growing up, learning to control our suffering. 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 realisation. Suffering, you see, is a kind of anger. We rage against the unfairness, the injustice of our sad and sorry lot.”

“Fear and guilt are the dark angels that haunt rich men, Khader said to me once. I wasn't sure if that was true, or if he simply wanted it to be true, but I did know from experience that despair and humiliation haunt the poor.”

“Oh, of course, naturally, God is impossible. That is the first proof that he exists." Nothing exists as we see it. Nothing we see is really there, as we think we are seeing it. Our eyes are liars. Everything that seems real, is merely part of the illusion.”

“But I couldn't respond. My culture had taught me all the wrong things well. So I lay completely still, and gave no reaction at all. But the soul has no culture. The soul has no nations. The soul has no colour or accent or way of life. The soul is forever. The soul is one. And when the heart has its moment of truth and sorrow, the soul can't be stilled. I clenched my teeth against the stars. I closed my eyes. I surrendered to sleep. One of the reasons why we crave love, and seek it so desperately, is that love is the only cure for loneliness, and shame, and sorrow. But some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only loneliness can help you find them again. Some truths about yourself are so painful that only shame can help you live with them. And some things are just so sad that only your soul can do the crying for you.”

“The amount of force and violence necessary to board the train, for example was no less and no more than the amoount of politeness and consideration necessary to ensure that the cramped journey was as pleasant as possible afterwards. What is necessary? That was the unspoken but implied, and unavoidable question everywhere in India.”

“I think the future is like anything else that's important. It has to be earned. If we don't earn it, we don't have a future at all. And if we don't earn it, we don't deserve it, we have to live in the present, more or less forever. Or worse, we have to live in the past. I think that's probably what love is - a way of earning the future.”

“What we call cowardice is often just another name for being taken by surprise, and courage is seldom any better than simply being well prepared.”

“Civilization, after all, is defined by what we forbid, more than what we permit.”

“A politician is someone who promises a bridge even when there's no water”

“Nothing in the world is so soft and pleasing to the touch, as the skin of a woman's thigh. No flower, feather or fabric, can match that velvet whisper of flesh. No matter how unequal they may be in any other ways, all women, old and young, fat and thin, beautiful and ugly, have that perfection. It's a great part of the reason why men hunger to possess women, and so often convince themselves that they do possess them: the thigh, that touch.”

“There's a truth deeper than experience. It's beyond what we see, or even what we feel. It's an order of truth that separates the profound from the merely clever, and the reality from the perception. We're helpless, usually, in the face of it; and the cost of knowing it, like the cost of knowing love, is sometimes greater than any heart would willingly pay. It doesn't always help us to love the world, but it does prevent us from hating the world. And the only way to know that truth is to share it, from heart to heart, just as Prabhakar told it to me, just as I'm telling it to you now.”

“Aunque tardé mucho tiempo y tuve que recorrer gran parte del mundo para aprender lo que ahora sé sobre el amor, el destino y las decisiones que tomamos, la esencia de ese conocimiento me llegó en un solo instante, encadenado a una pared mientras me torturaban. De algún modo me di cuenta entonces, entre los gritos que llenaban mi cabeza, que incluso en aquella maniatada y sangrienta impotencia, seguía conservando mi libertad; la libertad de odiar a los hombres que me estaban torturando o de perdonarles. No parece mucho, lo sé, pero sometidos al dolor y al suplicio de las cadenas, cuando es lo único que tenemos, esa libertad es un universo de posibilidades. Y la decisión que tomemos, sea el odio o el perdón, puede convertirse en la historia de nuestra vida.”

“So when will be the time to get on the train?I think.....a little bit almost quite very soon and not long.”