Quotes from Gregory David Roberts

In matters of food I am French, in matters of love I am Italian, and in matters of business I am Swiss. Very Swiss.

I looked at her for a while, reading the runes in her sky-blue eyes. Then I stood from the wall, held her in my arms, and kissed her. It was a long kiss. We lived out a life together in that kiss: we lived and loved and grew old together, and we died. Then our lips parted, and that life we might've had retreated, shrinking to a spark of light we would always recognise in one another's eyes.

Guilt is the hilt of the knife that we use on ourselves, and love is often the blade; but it's worry that keeps the knife sharp, and worry that gets most of us, in the end.

It is a no that means maybe, and the more passionate the no, the more definite the maybe.

There is another reality beyond what we see with our eyes. You have to feel your way into that reality with your heart. There is no other way.

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 dead and gone. For I still love you with the whole of my heart. I still love you. And sometimes, my friend, the love that I have and can't give to you, crushes the breath from my chest. Sometimes, even now, my heart is drowning in a sorrow that has no stars without you, and no laughter, and no sleep.

It's funny, everyone seems to ask me that in the last few days.

We walked on the road because the footpaths were occupied in many places by sleeping pavement dwellers.

It was a measure of just how lost and lonely I was, in my exile, that I looked forward to fighting him.

Sometimes, even now, my heart is drowning in a sorrow that has no stars without you, and no laughter, and no sleep.

If there is any essence of your spirit lingering here, come into our hearts, now, and stay with us, when we leave this place where you left us, so that we can carry you inside us, and always love you.

The first rule of black business everywhere is: never let anyone know what you're thinking. Didier's corollary to the rule was: always know what others think of you.

a little less and a little more every day

One of the reasons why we crave love, and seek it so desperately, is that love is the only cure for loneliness, and shame, and sorrow. But some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only loneliness can help you find them again. Some truths about yourself are so painful that only shame can help you live with them. And some things are just so sad that only your soul can do the crying for you. CHAPTER SIX PRABAKER'S

Our bodies are the children of all the suns and other stars that died before us, making the atoms that we are made of.

The newly dead are ancestors, too. We respect the chain of life and love when we celebrate that life, not mourn the death. We all know that, and we all say it, when loved ones leave.

no-one ever seemed inclined to repair

We can compel men not to be bad, but we cannot compel them to be good

Did anyone ever tell you you've got a very peculiar way of putting things?

And when all the other lights of life are gone, the last light lost is the light of love.

Gold fires the eyes with a different kind and colour of greed. Money's almost always just a means to an end; but, for many men, gold is an end in itself, and their love for it is the kind of thing that can give love a bad name.

Whatever the reason, I felt dishearteningly alone in the city.

I understood their hopeful, innocent excitement, and in a small and distant way I even shared it.

I still loved him, and I was still bonded to him as a son to his father, but he was no longer my revered and flawless hero.