Quotes from Gregory David Roberts

It was as if all of those hundreds of people were costumed for home, for themselves, not for the public promenades.

Asking you...it was just a way of closing a door on it. It's just something I had to ask.

I was helpless to stop it, and I knew it.

And her words, there is only love, passed like prayer-bead wishes on a thread of possibility as the music and laughter crashed around me.

Some people always manage to make us feel sorry for them, no matter how stupid and angry we feel about it after. They're the canaries, kind of, in the coalmines of our hearts.

What I didn't know then, and what troubled me for a long time that Day of the Slaves, was how I could be there, and look at the children, and not be crushed by it.

When the light on that long night became the dawn...

You can't hate love, Karla,' I said, laughing gently, and trying to lighten her mood. 'Maybe not, but you sure as hell can be sick of it. It's such a huge arrogance, to love someone, and there's too much of it around. There's too much love in the world. Sometimes I think that's what heaven is—a place where everybody's happy because nobody loves anybody else, ever.

It doesn't always help us to love the world, but it does prevent us from hating the world.

I fell onto the bed and was asleep in seconds. It was a nourishing, dreamless sleep, but I woke after four hours, and I was too alert, too restless, to find sleep again.

La scelta che fai, odio o perdono, può diventare la storia della tua vita.

Some men like you less the more they owe you. Some men only really begin to like you when they find themselves in your debt.

The moon, almost full, was pinned like a medal to the chest of the sky.

The sound of her voice and the sight of her face pulled all the air from my lungs, and set my heart thumping.

Tears begin in the heart, but some of us deny the heart so often, and for so long, that when it speaks we hear not one but a hundred sorrows in the heartbreak. We know that crying is a good and natural thing. We know that crying isn't a weakness, but a kind of strength. Still, the weeping rips us root by tangled root from the earth, and we crash like fallen trees when we cry.

His face was unmarked, his skin showing no scar or scratch or faded bruise. It occurred to me, as I listened to his genial chatter, that it was likely he'd never been in a fight, or even closed his fist in anger. I envied him. When I allowed myself to look into the half-collapsed tunnel of the past, it seemed that I'd been fighting all my life.

I did know from experience that despair and humiliation haunt the poor.

La droga tutto e nulla: ti prende tutto, e non ti lascia nulla. Ma il nulla che ti offre, il vuoto privo di sentimenti che ti elargisce, a volte è tutto ciò che desideri.

If you have a chance at real happiness, whatever the cost, you have to take it.

Nothing exists as we see it. Nothing we see is really there, as we think we are seeing it. Our eyes are liars. Everything that seems real, is merely part of the illusion. Nothing exists, as we think it does. Not you. Not me. Not this room. Nothing.

Listen, where are you going?' 'What?' 'Where

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

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 how that...they know that romances almost never end as well as they begin.

It was pretty depressing. There's a lot of people here who want the war to go on forever, and they don't give a shit who's getting killed or who's doing the killing.