Quotes from Gregory David Roberts

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

Karla is reasonably good at being a friend, but she is stupendously good at being an enemy. When you judge the power that is in a person, you must judge their capacities as both friend and as enemy. And there is no-one in this city that makes a worse or more dangerous enemy than Karla.

If we can't use it to make life better for our families and loved ones, money has no purpose.

Then you said, The truth is a bully we all pretend to like.

What we tell, is rarely what we do.

Fanatics,' Didier mused, ignoring the rebuke, 'always seem to have the same scrubbed and staring look about them. They have the look of people who do not masturbate, but who think about it almost all the time.

We were silent again, staring at each other instead of the view.

But I didn't know that then. I washed my hands in the cold, uncaring sea, and my conscience was as silent and remote as the mute, unreachable stars.

She was used and abused, and I, for one, would've expected her to be more cynical. 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 humour, and it turns up where you least expect it.

There's no heart like the Indian heart.

When we get older—when the steel door slams shut, in one way or another—we know that real suffering is measured by what's taken away from us.

I felt defiled by my own health and the money in my pockets. If you feel it at all, it's a lacerating guilt, that first confrontation with the wretched of the earth.

You know, I said that once, to a friend of mine, and he told me that the real trick in life is to want nothing, and to succeed in getting it.

Wisdom is just cleverness, with all the guts kicked out of it.

Then the smoulders of shame and guilt flamed into anger, became fist-tightening rage at the unfairness of it: What kind of a government, I thought, what kind of a system allows suffering like this?

I've got issues of my own—things in my past I'd rather not go back to. Things I won't go back to.

It's okay, Karla once said, because if we all learned what we should learn, the first time round, we wouldn't need love at all.

The people are waiting more than one hour already. If you are not with us, they would still be waiting, but waiting for nothing only. Waiting for nothing, that is what kills the heart of a man, isn't it? Now the people are waiting for something. Waiting for you, they are.

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.

the test of a real Borsalino hat is to roll it into a cylinder, roll it up into a very tight tube, and pass it through a wedding ring. If it emerges from this test without permanent creases, and if it springs back to its original shape, and if it is not damaged in the experience, it is a genuine Borsalino.

his struggle there to love and to be loved in return, and his drag-footed walk along the shoreline of his Fate are the fragments of his shipwreck survival.

Children played everywhere. Men carried water in buckets. Men made repairs to one of the huts. And everywhere that I looked, people smiled and laughed.

And some time during the course of that love-song, somewhere in the landscape of the slum-dwellers' reassurances, somehow through the fact of our survival, their world enfolded my life within its dreams, as gently and completely as a swollen tide closes over a stone that stands upon its shore.

No-one, and nothing, could hurt me. No-one, and nothing, could make me very happy. I was tough, which is probably the saddest thing you can say about a man.