Quotes from Gregory David Roberts

But I was loyal to the men, not the mafia; to the brothers, not the brotherhood. I worked for the mafia, but I didn't join it. I'm not a joiner. I never found a club or clan or idea that was more important to me than the men and women who believed in it. And

She was the most beautiful woman I'd ever known. It was the beauty of a desert at dawn: a loveliness that filled my eyes, and crushed me into silent, unbreathing awe.

But sometimes, being silent is the only way to tell the truth.

You should let Jesus in your heart.' 'Jesus is in every heart, brother.' 'Are you serious?' 'Of course. I love that guy. Who doesn't?' 'A lot of people don't,' he laughed. 'Some people hate Jesus.' 'No. Brilliant mind, loving heart, significant penance: Jesus was the real deal. They might know Christians they don't like, but nobody hates Jesus.

I take everything personally—that's what being a person is all about.

I can't stand politicians. A politician is someone who promises you a bridge, even when there's no river.

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

I began to see how deep the well of her loving was, and how much her happiness and confidence depended on drawing that love into the light, and sharing it. And love was beautiful in her. It was a clear sky she gave us with those eyes, and a summer morning with her smile.

Happiness is a myth,' Karla snapped back angrily. 'It was invented to make us buy things.

You can never tell what people have inside them until you start taking it away, one hope at a time

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

It's not just the body that must survive a jail term: 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, at the end of his sentence, can't be said to have survived it.

We can deny the past, but we can't escape its torment because the past is a speaking shadow that keeps pace with the truth of what we are, step for step, until we die.

each one of us, we all have to earn our future,' she said slowly. '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, if 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.

When you're sober and fit, it's the world that's fucked.

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.

I was thinking about another kind of river, one that runs through every one of us, no matter where we come from, all over the world. It's the river of the heart, and the heart's desire. It's the pure, essential truth of what each one of us is, and can achieve.

Prisons are the temples where devils learn to prey.

honour is the art of being humble.

The worst thing about corruption as a system of governance, is that it works so well.

If we do not suffer with our pain, then we have not learned about anything but ourselves.

Depression only happens to people who don't know how to be sad.

I sat near enough to hear the happiness, but far enough away not to feel it.

Fate always gives you two choices: the one you should take, and the one you do.