Quotes from Gregory David Roberts

The questions buzzed and swarmed in my whirling mind.

Who are we to believe in God?' she said, her lips only lashes from my face. 'It should be enough for anyone that God believes in us.

Fanatics 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.

let yourself go. Sometimes, in India, you have to surrender before you win.

It wasn't until I'd asked myself the question that I realized I already had the answer.

Every virtuous act has some dark secret in its heart, Khaderbhai once told me, and every risk we take contains a mystery that can't be solved.

The pages were dog-eared, and heavily annotated in Karla's own hand. (...) She consumed her books, I saw. She devoured her books, and was unafraid to mark them, even to scar them, with her own comments and system of references.

Well,' I laughed, 'I certainly don't know God, and frankly I'm inclined to think that God is impossible to believe in, at least most of the notions of God that I've come across.' 'Oh, of course, naturally, God is impossible. That is the first proof that He exists.' He

never found a club or clan or idea that was more important to me than the men and women who believed in it.

hate politics, and politicians even more. They make a religion of being greedy. It's unforgivable.

Nothing, my old friend. Only, is it not true that some of our strength comes from suffering? That suffering hardship makes us stronger? That those of us who have never known a real hardship, and true suffering, cannot have the same strength as others, who have suffered much? And if that is true, does that not mean that your argument is the same thing as saying that we have to be weak to suffer, and we have to suffer to be strong, so we have to be weak to be strong?

But survival means more than simply being alive.

In the beginning we feared everything - animals, the weather, the trees, the night sky - everything except each other. Now we fear each other, and almost nothing else. No one knows why anyone does anything. No one tells the truth. No one is happy. No one is safe.

You're so loved,' she said. 'And I'm so glad to finally tell you.' It was too much, it was every dream. Doubt, the thing that fights love, pushed me to the cliff, daring me to jump. I jumped.

There is no objective and universally acceptable definition of good and evil. And until we have one, we will go on justifying our own actions, while condemning the actions of the others.

And it's for those small victories of the heart, and the spirit, and the will that we sometimes risk the body that cradles them.

of greed, which is the opposite of love.

Every city has a village in its heart. You will never understand the city, unless you first understand the village.

They sang of heartbreak, and all the sorrows of loss.

It stopped me. I felt, as I too often did, that I was abandoning him. It was foolish, I knew: Didier was arguably the most self-sufficient contrabandist in the city. He was one of the last independent gangsters, owing nothing, not even fear, to the mafia Companies, cops and street gangs that controlled his illegal world. But there are some people, some loves, that worry every goodbye, and leaving them is like leaving the country of your birth.

hope, which is the opposite of hate;

There's no such thing as forever. I don't know why we use the word.

If you'd been born and raised in Palestine, you'd know that some people are born to suffer. And it never stops, for them. Not for a second. You'd know where real suffering comes from. It's the same place where love and freedom and pride are born.

Even in that, I discovered, human beings will find an art.