Quotes from Gregory David Roberts

Prabaker has a disappointing habit of telling everybody the truth.

When we act, even with the best of intentions, when we interfere with the world, we always risk a new disaster that mightn't be of our making, but that wouldn't occur without our action. Some of the worst wrongs, Karla once said, were caused by people who tried to change things.

assassin grief, he'd once called it: the kind of grief that lies in wait and attacks from ambush, with no warning and no mercy. I know now that assassin grief can hide for years and the strike suddenly, on the happiest day, without discernible reason or exegesis.

The simple and astonishing truth about India and Indian people is that when you go there, and deal with them, your heart always guides you more wisely than your head. There's nowhere else in the world where that's quite so true.

Money isn't the root of all evil. Evil is the root of all money. There's no such thing as clean money. All the money in the world is dirty, in some way, because there's no clean way to make it.

the real trick in life is to want nothing, and to succeed in getting it.

Sometimes the lion must roar, just to remind the horse of his fear.

m??czy?ni zdradzajÄ… swoje myÅ›li, odwracajÄ…c wzrok, a uczucia – wahajÄ…c siÄ™. Z kobietami, dodaÅ'a, jest dokÅ'adnie na odwrót.

The one entertainment he allowed himself was a trip to the cheapest cinema, with his workmates, once a week.

assassin grief, he'd once called it: the kind of grief that lies in wait and attacks from ambush, with no warning and no mercy. I know now that assassin grief can hide for years and then strike suddenly, on the happiest day, without discernible reason or exegesis.

Suffering is the truth. Not suffering is the lie. I told you that, once before. That's just the way the world is.

There was so much sadness in it, but so much power as well.

The people showed thanks, rather than saying it, and I'd come to accept that.

We can deny the past, but we can't escape its torment because the past is a speaking shadow that keeps pace with the truth of what we are, step for step, until we die.

And her forehead was always slightly creased in the centre, between the brows, as if she was grasping, in those soft folds of skin, the monstrous and 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.

Fear is a wolf on a chain, only dangerous when you set it free. Sorrow exhausts itself in the net of forgetting. Anger, for all its fury, can be killed by a smile. Only hope goes on forever, because hope doesn't belong to us: it belongs to our ancestors, the first of our kind, whose brave love for one another gave us most of the good that we are. And hope, that ancient seed, redeems the heart it feeds.

fate has every power over us, but two. Fate cannot control our free will, and fate cannot lie.

She was almost too beautiful: as beautiful as a blush of summer sunset on a sky-wide stream of cloud.

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

The heartbeat of any conscious now is poised on the same choice that hope gives all of us, between shadows of the past, and the bright, blank page of any new day.

I asked, pushing a canoe of thought out into the uncharted water of his ideas.

Are you curing people by telepathy now?

I couldn't understand the dark and trembling mood that was moving in me, swelling to the sorrow I'd too long denied, I couldn't understand it, so I tried to fight it as a man fights pain or despair. But you can't bite down on assassin grief, and will it away. The enemy stalks you, step for step, and knows your every move before you make it. The enemy is your own grieving heart and, when it strikes, it can't miss.

Sooner or later, fate puts us together with all the people, one by one, who show us what we could, and shouldn't, let ourselves become.