Quotes from Gregory David Roberts

News tells you what people did. Gossip tells you how much they enjoyed it.

A man trusts another man when he sees enough of himself in him, I guess. Or maybe when he sees the things he wishes he had in himself.

I was practising, trying to remember what it was like to be me.

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 others.

But first you need the theory, before you can make a profit from the practice.

In this life, we do what we can to improve ourselves.

Corruption is a tax imposed on any society that doesn't pay people enough to repel it themselves.

Is love, yes, when a terrible feeling makes you happy?

The first is this: that pain and suffering are connected, but they are not the same thing. Pain can exist without suffering, and it is also possible to suffer without feeling pain.

I had no idea where in all the wide world I might begin to look for her.

Tell people as much as they need to know, he said. I remember that he was smiling when he said it, like there was nothing to it. And ask people for help, he said. You'll be all right … Don't worry … It's a great adventure, your life, and it has only just begun …

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. I

Pain without suffering is like victory without struggle.

One of the agonising truths for a battle medic is that you pray as hard and almost as often for men to die as you pray for them to live.

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.

Whatever the reason, I felt dishearteningly alone in the city. I'd lost Prakabar and Abdullah, my closest friends, in the same week, and with them I'd lost the mark on the psychic map that says You Are Here. 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.

When I smiled my relief and surprise, the man grinned back at me with that perfect sincerity we fear and call simple-minded.

I didn't know then, as I do now, that love's a one-way street. Love, like respect, isn't something you get; it's something you give.

His was the definition that stayed with me.

In the end I realised that it was the heart, the Indian heart that Vikram had talked about—the land where heart is king—that held me when so many intuitions told me I should leave.

loves that produce our courage.

I think I'd hoped to be released by it, and solaced, just by hearing her tell me. But it wasn't like that. I felt empty: the kind of emptiness that's sad but not distressed, pitying but not broken-hearted, and damaged, somehow, but clearer and cleaner for it. And then I knew what it was, that emptiness: there's a name for it, a word we use often, without realizing the universe of peace that's enfolded in it. The word is free.

And little by little, things settled down to the semblance of peace that's good enough, when you know enough about bad enough.

Someone told me once that if you make your heart into a weapon, you always end up using it on yourself.