Quotes from Gregory David Roberts

fair . . . forgiving . . . punish . . . and save . . .

The popular European and American caricature of Afghans as wild, bloodthirsty men—a description that delighted Afghans themselves endlessly when they heard it—was contradicted by every direct contact I had with them. Face to face, Afghan men were generous, friendly, honest, and scrupulously courteous to me.

There is no fear and there is no greed in love, just as there is no authority or control, which is why it is beyond illusions of power.

Ask any man with a long-enough experience of prisons, and he'll tell you that all it takes to harden a man's heart is a system of justice.

Fear and guilt are the dark angels that haunt rich men.

And all of it depended upon our action, our interference in his life, because no man is saved without love.

But I couldn't cry them, those tears, and I felt that I was drowning in a sorrow that was bigger than the heart that tried to hold it.

Let me put it another way. The agents of creation, the energy that actually animates the matter and the life that we think we see around us, cannot be measured or weighed or even put into time, as we know it. In one form, that energy is photons of light. The smallest object is a universe of open space to them, and the entire universe is but a speck of dust. What we call

I wasn't sure if that was true, or if he simply wanted it to be true, but I did know from experience that despair and humiliation haunt the poor.

Signing off now, but keeping the line open, as always, I'll say Amen.

But we made the night bright and the sunlight right a lot of the time, and never felt used or unloved.

Where did we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going?

And I'd learned, the hard way, that sometimes, even with the purest intentions, we make things worse when we do our best to make things better.

the student is ready, the teacher appears—

There is nothing so depressing as good advice, and I will be pleased if you do not inflict it upon me.

the longer I went without it, the more important it seemed to become.

Even the power of prayer, master-ji?' Ambitious asked. 'Is there no such thing?' 'There is the spiritual energy of prayer,' Idriss replied, 'just as there is the spiritual energy of love, and both are reservoirs of grace, but there is no power. Energy is the process, and power is the attempt to control the process.

Optimism is the first cousin of love, and it's exactly like love in three ways: it's pushy, it has no real sense of humor, and it turns up where you least expect it.

So … when will it be the time for the getting on the train?' 'I think … a little bit almost quite very soon, and not long.

I was almost angry that she'd made me see the unlovely truth of my house.

Every act of love, every moment of the heart reaching out, is a part of the universal good: it's a part of God, or what we call God, and it can never die.

Personality and personal identity are in some ways like co-ordinates on the street map drawn by our intersecting relationships. We know who we are and we define what we are by references to the people we love and our reasons for loving them. I

It was the mix of hashish and marijuana known as ganga-jamuna, named after the two holy rivers, Ganges and Jamner. It was so potent, and came with such force from the water-pipe, that almost at once my bloodshot eyes failed in focus and I experienced a mild, hallucinatory effect: the blurring at the edges of other people's faces, and a minuscule time-delay in their movements. The Lewis Carrolls, Karla called it. I'm so stoned, she used to say, I'm getting the Lewis Carrolls

Anarchists...' I began and then faltered. 'No political philosophy I ever heard of loves the human race as much as anarchism. Every other way of looking at the world says that people have to be controlled, and ordered around, and governed. Only the anarchists trust human beings enough to let them work it out for themselves. And I used to be that optimistic once. I used to believe and think like that. But I don't, any more. So, no--I guess I'm not an anarchist now.