Quotes from Gregory David Roberts

Silences can wound as surely as the twisting lash, the poet Sadiq Khan once wrote. But sometimes, being silent is the only way to tell the truth.

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

A strong man can make his own luck.

This is why killing and stealing are wrong—not because a book tells us they are wrong, or a law tells us they are wrong, or a spiritual guide tells us they are wrong, but because if everyone did them we would not move toward the ultimate complexity that is God, with the rest of the universe.

MEN WAGE WARS for profit and principle, but they fight them for land and women.

Loyalty is something you need for things you don't love enough. When you love enough, loyalty isn't even a question.

People always hurt us with their trust, Karla said to me once. The surest way to hurt someone you like, is to put all your trust in him.

If you get paid in money, somebody, somewhere, is suffering for it.

Are we ever justified in what we do? That question ruined my sleep for a long time after I saw the tortured little mouse. When we act, even with the best of intentions, when we interfere with the world, we always risk a new disaster that mightn't be of our making, but that wouldn't occur without our action. Some of the worst wrongs, Karla once said, were caused by people who tried to change things.

Time is the web, and Fate is the spider.

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

The size of our happiness is inversely proportional to the size of our house.

What is civilisation? Idriss once remarked. It's a woman, free to live as she wants.

Fear and guilt haunt the rich. Despair and humiliation haunt the poor.

Love survives in us precisely because it isn't wise.

No, Lin! This is India. Nobody can take his clothes off, not even to wash his bodies. This is India. Nobody is ever naked in India. And especially, nobody is naked without clothes.

But the past has a way of taking you to the right place at the wrong time, and that can be a storm inside.

Silence is the tortured man's revenge.

Despotism despieses nothing so much as righteousness in its victims

You can respect a man's rights or opinions without knowing the man at all. But you can only respect the man himself when you find something in him that's worthy of the word.

eats most of his meals

People haven't stopped believing in love. They haven't stopped wanting to be in love. They just don't believe in a happy ending anymore. They still believe in love, and falling in love, but they know now that...they know that romances almost never end as well as they begin.

Every act of love, every moment of the heart reaching out, is a part of the universal good: it's a part of God, or what we call God, and it can never die.

Non diventi uomo finché non doni il tuo amore sincero e disinteressato ad un bambino. Ma non sei un vero uomo finché non ricevi in cambio l'amore sincero e disinteressato di un bambino.