Quotes from Gregory David Roberts

credit, security passes, and other documents. It was a booming trade in the booming economy of Bombay, and we often worked through the dawn to satisfy the demand. And the business was generational: as licensing authorities and other bodies

A man is truly a man when he wins the love of a good woman, earns her respect, and keeps her trust. Until you can do that, you're not a man.

as if the word was a euphemism for some kind of infection.

Of course, what we know about the universe, and our place in it, is constantly changing as we add more information and gain new insights.

Fate needs accomplices, and the stones in destiny's walls are mortared with small and heedless complicities such as those.

as if she was announcing that she'd just received some distinguished award.

Una volta un uomo saggio - un musulmano, badate bene - mi ha detto di sentirsi più vicino a un ebreo, a un cristiano, a un buddhista o persino a un ateo razionale e ragionevole che a un fanatico della sua stessa religione. E sono d'accordo con Winston Churchill, secondo il quale un fanatico è una persona che non cambia opinione e non è capace di cambiare argomento

And some things are just so sad that only your soul can do the crying for you.

Like most things, and most people, it's not as bad as it looks from the outside.

pitiable understanding that no happiness exists without its woe, no wealth without its cost, and no life without its full measure, sooner or later, of sorrowing and death.

La sofferenza non è necessariamente un segno di debolezza; con uno sforzo di volontà è possibile sopportarla: la forza di volontà nasce da un severo autocontrollo, che è di per sè una forma di sofferenza volontaria

I realised that she was early drunk, in that squall of coherence before slurred speech and clumsiness and collapse.

If we have no commonly agreed criterion for measuring length, we will never agree about how much land is yours, and how much is mine, or how to cut lengths of wood when we build a house. There would be chaos.

Very well. I think that you can see my point here—we avoid chaos, in building houses and dividing land and so forth, by having an agreed standard for the measure of a unit of length.

we can only avoid chaos in the world of human affairs by having an agreed standard for the measure of a unit of morality.

At first, when we truly love someone, our greatest fear is that the loved one will stop loving us. What we should fear and dread, of course, is that we won't stop loving them, even after they're gone...

You can only ever be yourself. The more you try to be like someone else, the more you find yourself standing in the way.

Every human heartbeat is a universe of possibilities.

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.

It's said that you can never go home again, and it's true enough, of course. But the opposite is also true. You must go back, and you always go back, and you can never stop no matter how hard you try.

The thought struck me that she would always look beautiful, even when she was being ugly. Hers was a big, lovely, empty face: the face of a pom-pom girl at a football match, the face advertisers use to help them sell preposterous and irrelevant things.

But fate—you know fate? Kismet is the word, in the Urdu language—fate has every power over us, but two. Fate cannot control our free will, and fate cannot lie. Men lie, to themselves more than to others, and to others more often than they tell the truth. But fate does not lie. Do you see?

So, while fire and smoke singed the midnight sky, and bells and sirens railed about a kilometre away, we directed our men as they moved the heavy equipment into the new factory. And Krishna and Villu went to work almost at once.

Surrounded by people and hungry for solitude, I was always and everywhere alone.