Quotes from Gregory David Roberts

Oh, of course, naturally, God is impossible. That is the first proof that he exists. Nothing exists as we see it. Nothing we see is really there, as we think we are seeing it. Our eyes are liars. Everything that seems real, is merely part of the illusion.

Friendship is something that gets harder to understand, every damn year of my life.Friendship is like a kind of algebra test that nobody passes. In my worst moods, I think the best you can say is that a friend is anyone you don't despise.

Suffering is how we test our love especially our love for God.

It's such a huge arrogance to love someone, and there's too much of it around. There's too much love in this world. Sometimes I think that's what heavens is-- a place where everybody's happy because nobody loves anybody else, ever.

The more you try to be like someone else, the more you find yourself standing in the way.

Nothing in the world is so soft and pleasing to the touch, as the skin of a woman's thigh. No flower, feather or fabric, can match that velvet whisper of flesh. No matter how unequal they may be in any other ways, all women, old and young, fat and thin, beautiful and ugly, have that perfection. It's a great part of the reason why men hunger to possess women, and so often convince themselves that they do possess them: the thigh, that touch.

but there's no nation uncorrupted. there's no system that's immune to the misuse of money.

Cowardece is often just another name for being taken by surprise.

I know now that when the loving, honest moment comes it should be seized, and spoken, because it may never come again. And unvoiced, unmoving, unlived in the things we declare form heart to heart, those true and real feelings wither and crumble in the remembering hand that tries too late to reach for them.

I went to war. .... I survived, while other men around me died. ... men whose lives were crunched up in mistakes, and thrown away by the wrong second of someone else's hate, or love, or indifference.

Its a fact of being in love that we often pay no attention whatsoever to the substance of what a lover says, while being intoxicated to ecstasy by the way it's said. I was in love with her eyes, but I didn't read them. I loved her voice, but I didn't really hear the fear & the anguish in it.

What is it? she asked. I'm looking for your wings. You are my guardian angel, aren't you? I'm afraid not, she replied, her cheeks dimplingwith a wry smile. There's too much of the devil in me for that. Just how much devil, I grinned, are we talking about here?

Every virtuous act has some Dark secret in its heart; every risk we take contains a mystery that can't be solved.

We are collections of things that we find and experience and value and keep inside ourselves, sometimes knowingly, sometimes unknowingly, and that collection of things is what we finally become.

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. And if we don't earn it, we don't deserve it, we have to live in the present, more or less forever. Or worse, we have to live in the past. I think that's probably what love is - a way of earning the future.

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 everythign 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. Sometimes, we do see.

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.

Waiting for nothing, that is what kills the heart of a man, isn't it?

The heart doesn't know how to quit, because it doesn't know how to lie.

A young man didn't bring flowers or chocolates to the woman he loved: He brought her stories from the wider world, where men grappled with demons of desire, and monstrous injustice.

Remember,' Khader said insistently, resting his hand on my forearm to emphasise his words. 'Sometimes it is necessary to do the wrong thing for the right reasons. The important thing is to be sure that our reasons are right, and that we admit the wrong--that we do not lie to ourselves, and convince ourselves that what we do is right.

In the face of all that is so wrong with the world, the very worst thing you can do is survive. And yet you must survive. It is this dilemma that makes us believe and cling to the lie that we have a soul, and that there is a God who cares about its fate.

Motive matters more with good deeds than it does with bad.

But I smiled, and smiling was easy, no matter how strange and disorienting the street seemed to be. I was a fugitive. I was a wanted man, a hunted man, with a price on my head. And I was still one step ahead of them. I was free. Every day, when you're on the run, is the whole of your life. Every free minute is a short story with a happy ending.