Michael Robotham

“...let me tell you what's more immoral. Doing nothing. Sitting back in your comfortable chair in your comfortable home thinking that just because you sponsor a child in Zambia you're doing enough.”

“Why give me this life and then give me this disease? Why give me joy and beauty of you and Charlie and then snatch it away? It’s like showing someone a glimpse of what life could be like and in the next breath telling them that it can never happen”

“Don’t say anything unless you can improve on the silence.”

“Do you believe in God?” he asks.“Do you?”“I used to”“What happened?”“I couldn’t find him. He’s supposed to be everywhere. I mean, he’s not supposed to be playing hide-and-seek.”

“Did you ever see the Truman Show?...Well sometimes I think I’m Truman. I think the whole world is watching me. My life has been created by someone else’s expectations. Everything is a façade. The walls are plywood and the furniture is papier-mâché. And then I think that if I could just run fast enough, I’d get around the next corner and find the back lot of the film set. But I can never run fast enough. By the time I arrive, they’ve built another street… and another.”

“I know the answer now, but I’m so frightened I’ve forgotten the question.”

“People think it’s easy to be cynical and pessimistic, but it’s incredibly hard work. It’s much easier to be hopeful.”

“Raising children I’ve decided is a lot sadder than I expecte4d. Seeing them grow up brightly and vividly is tempered by the knowledge that each year brings another share of lasts. The last time I push my daughter on a swing. The last time I play Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus. The last time I read a bedtime story. If I could give my daughters one piece of advice I would tell them to make the most of the first times -their first kiss, their first date, their first love, the first smile of their first child…There can only be one.”

“Sometimes I wake at night and worry that I might have disappeared in my sleep. That's what happens when nobody cares about you. Bit by bit you begin to disappear until people look right through your chest and head like you're made of glass. It's not about love; it's about being forgotten. We only exist if others think about us. It is like that tree that falls in the forest with nobody around to hear it. Who the fuck cares except the birds?”

“I know it sounds foolishly old fashioned, but I'm stuck with this idea that there's something dignified and noble about facing your enemy and looking him in the eye before you thrust a saber in his heart.”

“I don't know why people keep trying to help me like this. They should be heading for the hills. Ali says I inspire loyalty but I seem to be taking kindness that I can never hope to repay. I am not a perfect human being. I'm a cynic and a pessimist and sometimes I feel as though I'm locked into this life by an accident of birth. But at times like this, a random act of kindness or the touch of another human being makes me believe I can be different, better, redeemed.”

“I was in love with her. And it didn't matter that she wasn't in love with me. I loved her. It was my love story. I don't expect you to understand that but it's true. You don't have to be loved back. You can love anyway.”

“It was the most important moment in human history, the telling of the first lie. That's what separates us from the other animals. It has nothing to do with humans thinking on a higher plane or having easily available credit. We lie to each other. We deliberately mislead.”

“I used to say I would pay good money to forget most of my life. Now I want the memories back.”

“Loving children is easy. Keeping them is hard.”

“Sometimes people don’t come back,' said Rachel. 'That’s why you should always make your goodbyes count.”

“Alcoholics don’t have relationships-they take hostages.”

“People talk about the sins of omission. What does that mean? Who decides if something is a sin? I know that I'm being semantic, but judging by the way people moralize and jump to conclusions, anyone would think that the truth is real and solid, that it's something that can be picked up and passed around, weighed and measured, before being agreed upon. But the truth isn't like that. If I were to tell you this story tomorrow it would be different than today. I would have filtered the details through my defenses and rationalized my actions. Truth is a matter of semantics, whether we like it or not.”

“What is the point of sharing your life with someone if you can't communicate with them about the things that matter?”

“People who lose children have their hearts warped into weird shapes. Some try to deny it has happened. Some pretend it hasn't. Losing friends or parents is not the same. To lose a child is beyond comprehension. It defies biology. It contradicts the natural order of history and genealogy. It derails common sense. It violates time. It creates a huge, black, bottomless hole that swallows all hope.”

“Jealousy is a terrible thing. I know all the psychological triggers. The fear of losing control, the fear of loss, the fear of abandonment, neglect and loneliness...But the most destructive thing about jealousy is that it kills what it values-the love you want to save won't survive the constraints of jealousy. There is no entitlement. Love is either equal or a tragedy.”

“You try to understand human behavior. You try to explain it. Not me. I know we're smaller than gorillas, bigger than chimps, worse than both of them and, for all our rationality, our rules and laws, our baser drives are still straight out of the jungle.”

“If I become the man you want, I wouldn't be the man I am.”

“I've discovered the secret of revenge. Outlive the f---ers! I'll dance on their graves.”

“Truth is a matter of semantics, whether we like it or not.”

“Here you can shoot the bad guys,' a mercenary says in Baghdad. 'In America we give them corporate bonuses.”

“Es ist mir egal, wie viel jemand auf der Bank hat - solange er kein Kind hat, besitzt er nichts von Wert.”

“Manchmal kommen Menschen nicht zurück. Deshalb sollte man immer darauf achten, sich richtig zu verabschieden.”

“Friendship is a difficult thing to define. Oscar here is my oldest friend. How would you define friendship, Oscar?"Oscar grunts slightly, as though the answer is obvious."Friendship is about choice and chemistry. It cannot be defined.""But surely there's something more to it than that.""It is a willingness to overlook faults and to accept them. I would let a friend hurt me without striking back," he says, smiling. "But only once."De Souza laughs. "Bravo, Oscar, I can always rely on you to distill an argument down to its purest form. What do you think, Dayel?"The Indian rocks his head from side to side, proud that he has been asked to speak next."Friendship is different for each person and it changes throughout our lives. At age six it is about holding hands with your best friend. At sixteen it is about the adventure ahead. At sixty it is about reminiscing." He holds up a finger. "You cannot define it with any one word, although honesty is perhaps the closest word-""No, not honesty," Farhad interrupts. "On the contrary, we often have to protect our friends from what we truly think. It is like an unspoken agreement. We ignore each other's faults and keep our confidences. Friendship isn't about being honest. The truth is too sharp a weapon to wield around someone we trust and respect. Friendship is about self-awareness. We see ourselves through the eyes of our friends. They are like a mirror that allows us to judge how we are traveling."De Souza clears his throat now. I wonder if he is aware of the awe that he inspires in others. I suspect he is too intelligent and too human to do otherwise."Friendship cannot be defined," he says sternly. "The moment we begin to give reasons for being friends with someone we begin to undermine the magic of the relationship. Nobody wants to know that they are loved for their money or their generosity or their beauty or their wit. Choose one motive and it allows a person to say, 'is that the only reason?'"The others laugh. De Souza joins in with them. This is a performance.He continues: "Trying to explain why we form particular friendships is like trying to tell someone why we like a certain kind of music or a particular food. We just do.”

“I thought I knew everything about friendship and family: the happiness, simplicity and joy within them. But there is another side of devotion, a side which Samira understands.”

“Some lids are best kept closed, glued, nailed, screwed down and buried under six feet of earth.”

“The elephant in the room. It can't be talked about. It can't be ignored.”

“I don't know what else to tell you. I often think how different my life would have been - how much happier - if you'd been a part of it. One day.”

“I know I should have ignored her. I should have called. Many times I almost did. I got as far as picking up the phone. Sometimes I even dialed your parents' number but then I wondered what I'd say to you. We had left it too long. How would we ever get around the silence, which was like an elephant sitting in the room?”

“Fleetingly, unnervingly, I understand what he's saying but cannot accept a world that is so brutally black and white. Murder, rape and torture are the apparatus of terrorists, not of civilized societies. If we become like them, what hope do we have?”

“Love and pain are not the same. But sometimes it feels like they should be. Love is put to test everyday. Pain is not. Yet the two of them are inseparable because true love cannot bear separation.”

“That's the problem with folks nowadays. Nobody takes responsibility for their actions. Make a mistake and you pay for it. That's life.”

“Some people are born to suffer. It never stops for them, not for a second .... they are made for it - sustained by it.”

“She is more memory than reality. She belongs to a time of teenage crushes, first kisses, crowded lecture halls and smoky pubs. Even if she had lived, we might have had nothing in common except the past.”

“It's strange, talking about love. I used to hate the word.Hate is too strong. I was sick of reading about it in books, hearing it in songs, watching it in films. It seemed such a huge burden to place on another person - to love them; to give them something so unbelievably fragile and expect them not to break it or lose it or leave it behind on the No.96 bus.”

“Everyone thinks I'm so strong. They expect me to face autumns and winters like that and bitch-slap them down; make them come to heel. I'm not so strong. I only pretend.”

“For a moment something struggles inside her. Then her mind empties and she surrenders. Fighting fate is too difficult. She must save herself to fight whatever fate throws up.”

“Sometimes friends do foolish things. My father told me that true friends are like gold coins. Ships are wrecked by storms and lie for hundreds of years on the ocean floor. Worms destroy the wood. Iron corrodes. Silver turns black but gold doesn't change in sea water. It loses none of its brilliance or colour. It comes up the same. It survives shipwrecks and time.”

“There is a moment when all hope disappears, all pride is gone, all expectations, all faith, all desire.”

“One of the strange things about friendship is that time together isn't cancelled out by time apart. One doesn't erase the other or balance it on some invisible scale. You can spend a few hours with someone and they will change your life, or you can spend a lifetime with a person and remain unchanged.”

“Norman Mailer said there were four stages in a marriage: first the affair then the marriage, then children and then finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce.”

“Remember, the worst hour of your life only lasts for sixty minutes. (292)”

“Getting to know patients is what I do. I learn about their deepest fears and secrets. A professional relationship becomes a personal one. It can be no other way. (190)”

“We are often criminals in the eyes of the earth, not only for having committed crimes, but because we know what crimes have been committed. - The Man in the Iron Mask (155)”

“Why do our parents have the ability to make us feel like children even when our hair is graying and we have a mortgage that feels like a Third World debt? (135)”