Quotes from Gregory David Roberts

Travelling time to and from work was eliminated when men lived on the site.

Any dark past is a vampire, feeding on the blood of the living moment, and letters are the bats.

But faith, unlike hope, can die. And when faith dies, the two friends that always die with it are constancy and commitment.

The cloak of the past is cut from patches of feeling, and sewn with rebus threads. Most of the time, the best we can do is wrap it around ourselves for comfort or drag it behind us as we struggle to go on. But everything has its cause and its meaning. Every life, every love, every action and feeling and thought has its reason and significance: its beginning, and the part it plays in the end.

A Dutch mercenary in Kinshasa once told me that the only time he ever stopped hating himself was when the risk he faced became so great that he acted without thinking or feeling anything at all. I wished he hadn't said it to me because I knew exactly what he meant.

My culture had taught me all the wrong things well. So I lay completely still, and gave no reaction at all. But the soul has no culture. The soul has no nations. The soul has no colour or accent or way of life. The soul is forever. The soul is one. And when the heart has its moment of truth and sorrow, the soul can't be stilled.

if we envy someone for all the right reasons, we're half way to wisdom.

It smells of heartbreak, and the struggle to live, and of the crucial failures and loves that produce our courage.

Each breath was an angry little victory.

I was exiled from my family, homeland, and culture. I thought that was the whole of it. Years into the banishment, I realised that I was exiled to something, as well. What I escaped to was the lonely, reckless freedom of the outcast.

There was hope and fearful excitement in the new.

but he boasted about the buildings as if they were his own design.

Are you afraid of heights? Only when I'm on them!

I think that we all, each one of us, we all have to earn our future,' she said slowly. 'I think the future is like anything else that's important. It has to be earned. If we don't earn it, we don't have a future at all.

you are not a man until you give your love, truly and freely, to a child. And you are not a good man until you earn the love, truly and freely, of a child in return.

Trying to be happier is as futile as trying to be taller

Prabaker had just then decided to like me, and for him that meant he was bound to a scrupulous and literal honesty in everything he said or did. It was at once his most endearing and most irritating quality, that he always told me the whole of the truth.

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.

Mirrors on those pillars, and on much of the free wall space, provided the patrons with one of the bar's major attractions: the chance to inspect, admire, and ogle others in a circumspect if not entirely anonymous fashion. For many, the duplication of their own images in two or more mirrors at the same time was not least among the pleasures of the pastime. Leopold's was a place for people to see, to be seen, and to see themselves in the act of being seen

It seemed impossible that a modern airport, full of prosperous and purposeful travellers, was only kilometres away from those crushed and cindered dreams.

I detest bullies for their cowardice, and despise them for their cruelty. I never knew a tough man who preyed on the weak. Tough men hate bullies almost as much as bullies hate tough men.

Bad cops are bad priests', she said. 'All confession, and no absolution.

Khaderbhai once said that every virtuous act is inspired by a dark secret. It mightn't be true of everyone, but it was true enough about me. The little good that I've done in the world has always dragged behind it a shadow of dark inspiration... ...When all the guilt and shame for the bad we've done have run their course, it's the good we did that can save us. But then, when salvation speaks, the secrets we kept, and the motives we concealed, creep from their shadows.

love's a one-way street. Love, like respect, isn't something you get; it's something you give.