Quotes from Gregory David Roberts

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

All my life I'd been a fighter. I was always ready, too ready, to fight for what I loved, and against what I deplored. In the end, I became the expression of that fight, and my real nature was concealed behind a mask of menace and hostility. The message of my face and my body's movement was, like that of a lot of other hard men, Don't fuck with me. In the end, I became so good at expressing the sentiment that the whole of my life became the message.

I'd lost my family, the friends of my youth, my country and its culture—all the things that had defined me, and given me identity.

We were silent for a time, each of us troubled, and stubbornly tempting fate in our own ways.

He wanted to tell me that he is in love with me. Why did I stop him? Am I so ashamed that it might be true?

Will you help us, Lin? We feel very sorry for that bear. Love is a special thing in the world. When two men have so much love in their hearts, even so it is for a bear, it must be protected, isn't it?

You're a good listener. That's dangerous, because its so hard to resist. Being listener to - really listened to - is the second-best thing in the world. What's the first best thing? Everybody knows that. The best thing in the world is power. ... And what about love? A lot of people say that love is the best thing in the world, not power. They're wrong. Love is the opposite of power. That's why we fear it so much.

with the words, but hearing them in

Now we both know sorrows are the seeds of loving. Now we both know I will live and I will die for this love.

love makes men big, and hate makes them small.

every time I entered the slum I felt the urge to let go and surrender to a simpler, poorer life, that was yet richer in respect, and love, and a vicinal connectedness to the surrounding sea of human hearts.

a king is a bad enemy, a worse friend, and a fatal family relation.

I felt refreshed, and my spirits revived.

Wenn man einem Mann zeigt, wie nichtig seine Hoffnung und sein Hoffen war, tötet man den hellen bejahenden Teil in ihm, der geliebt werden möchte.

A diffident smile flickered on her lips.

The cloak of the past is cut from patches of feeling, and

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.

Some of the worst things were caused by people who tried to change things.

Fear is a poverty of Truth, and Greed is a poverty of Faith

He looked back at the house and at all the buildings around it, searching for landmarks that would fix the place in his mental map.

I know now that when the loving, honest moment comes it should be seized, and spoken, because it may never come again. And unvoiced, unmoving, unlived in the things we declare from heart to heart, those true and real feelings wither and crumble in the remembering hand that tries too late to reach for them.

Sometimes the flashback is so sudden, and so inappropriate to the surrounding circumstance, that the only sane reaction is foolish, uncontrollable laughter.

Happiness is a myth, Karla once said. It was invented to make us buy things.

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