Quotes from Gregory David Roberts

There was silence, where so much sound had screamed.

The truth is a bully we all pretend to like/

I knew that every smile I took from them was swindled. Life on the run puts a lie in the echo of every laugh, and at least a little larceny in every act of love

And because I was in love with her, I felt trapped by those fictions.

I felt myself reddening slightly, not from embarrassment, but from shame, that she'd said so easily the very words, I like you, that I wouldn't let myself say to her.

The cloud-mottled night seemed full of signs and portents, as if fate itself was warning me to go or daring me to stay.

Happiness is a myth, Karla snapped back angrily. It was invented to make us buy things.

Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope. Sometimes we cry with everything except tears. In the end that's all there is: love and its duty, sorrow and its truth. In the end that's all we have—to hold on tight until the dawn.

Like many toilets in Goa, it was nothing more than a smooth, steep slope behind the squatting keyhole. Waste matter rolled down the slope to a narrow lane. Wild, hairy, black Goan pigs roamed the lanes, eating the waste.

Yes. You're a good listener. That's dangerous, because it's so hard to resist. Being listened to—really listened to—is the second-best thing in the world.

It was the kind of laugh that hunted down funny things, and killed them stone dead.

There's a kind of luck that's not much more than being in the right place at the right time, a kind of inspiration that's not much more than doing the right thing in the right way, and both only really happen to you when you empty your heart of ambition, purpose, and plan; when you give yourself, completely, to the golden, fate-filled moment.

The tears, when they came, slipped from he closed eyelids like so many beads on a prayer chain. Some women cry easily. The tears fall as gently as fragrant raindrops in a sun-shower, and leave the face clear and clean and almost radiant. Other women cry hard, and all the loveliness in them collapses in the agony of it.

Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope. Sometimes we cry with everything except tears. In the end that's all there is: love and its duty, sorrow and its truth. In the end that's all we have—to hold on tight until the dawn.

Don't you have someone waiting for you somewhere, or someone you should go to?

Quando agimos, mesmo com a melhor das intenções, quando interferimos com o mundo, arriscamos sempre um desastre, que poderá não sair da nossa mão, mas que não aconteceria sem a nossa intervenção.

There's no patience as pure as the patience we spend on loved ones, who make things harder than they need to be.

People say that money is the root of all evil. But it's not true. It's the other way round. 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. If you get paid in money, somebody, somewhere is suffering for it.

Monsoon rain fell upon the fountain and surrounding tiles: rain so dense and constant that the sky was a river, and our part of the world was its waterfall.

I was still angry, and hungry.

And the choice you make, between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.

If you make your heart into a weapon, you always end up using it on yourself.

Whatever it was, I meant to take her up on it. I meant to go there, and look for her. But

Fanaticism means that if you're not against me, you're against me.