Quotes from Gregory David Roberts

Men don't like to be that honest about love: to put the gun in a woman's hand, and hold it against their own hearts, and say, Here, this is how you kill me. But it was okay. It was okay.

I hate it when people take so long to drink a single glass. IT is like putting on a condom to masturbate.

good soldiers are defined by what they can endure, not by what they can inflict.

The weeks I'd spent in Bombay with Prabaker had taught me that the shaking or wiggling of the head from side to side—that most characteristic of Indian expressive gestures—was the equivalent of a forward nod of the head, meaning Yes.

Religion is just a long competition to see who can design the silliest hat. She's

The bride's father watched that effort with a critical eye. After satisfying himself that the weapon was suitably lethal, he gravely accepted it as a gift from the younger man. 'The groom has just sharpened the knife that the bride's father will use on him, if he ever mistreats the girl

I think wisdom is over-rated. Wisdom is just cleverness, with all the guts kicked out of it. I'd rather be clever than wise, any day. Most of the wise people I know give me a headache, but I never met a clever man or woman I didn't like.

It was] a beauty that sours if it isn't nourished by some goodness within.

I never stopped writing. It was what I did, no matter where I was or how my circumstances changed. One of the reasons I remember those early Bombay months so well is that, whenever I was alone, I wrote about those new friends and the conversations we shared. And writing was one of the things that saved me: the discipline and abstraction of putting my life into words, every day, helped me to cope with shame and its first cousin, despair.

Black money runs through the fingers faster than legal, hard-earned money. 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.

After a time, I realised that the changes were not mine, but hers alone. After a time, 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.

In the storm-lit darkness, the beaded sweat and raindrops on her arm were like so many glittering stars, and her skin was like a span of night sky.

Happiness is a myth, It was invented to make us buy things

Enough obedience will let people do just about anything to other people', I said. 'I like that answer,' Idriss said. Praise from the wise is the sweetest wine. I felt the warmth of it inside. 'Obedience is the assassin of conscience,' Idriss said softly, 'and that is why every lasting institution demands it.

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

To continue this point, the universe, as we know it, and from everything that we can learn about it, has been getting always more complex since it began. It does this because that is its nature. The tendency toward complexity has carried the universe from almost perfect simplicity to the kind of complexity that we see around us, everywhere we look. The universe is always doing this. It is always moving from the simple to the complex.

If there is a Divine Source of all things, our rational and logical duty is to that Divine Source,' Idriss replied. 'Our only other duty is to the humanity that we share, and the planet that sustains us. Everything beyond that is a personal preference.

His most striking feature was his nose, an instrument so huge and magnificently pendulous that is seemed designed for some purpose altogether more grand than merely inhaling air and fragrances.

We can't really know what a pleasure it is to run in our own language until we're forced to stumble in someone else's.

My heart moved through deep and silent water. No-one, and nothing, could really hurt me. No-one, and nothing, could make me very happy. I was tough, which is probably the saddest thing you can say about a man.

His eyes flickered a tiny, hopeful smile in response, but doubt quickly smothered it.

And we are, to the best of our knowledge, the most developed expression of the complexity in our bit of the universe. It would certainly be a major loss if we were to be annihilated. It would be a terrible waste of all that development. But the process would continue. We are, ourselves, expressions of that process. Our bodies are the children of all the suns and other stars that died, before us, making the atoms that we are made of.

Love, like respect, isn't something you get; it's something you give.

When you know you're going to die, there's no comfort in cleverness. Genius is vain, and cleverness is hollow, at the end.