Quotes from Gregory David Roberts

The contrast between the familiar and the exceptional was everywhere around me. A bullock cart was drawn up beside a modern sports car at a traffic signal. A man squatted to relieve himself behind the discreet shelter of a satellite dish. An electric forklift truck was being used to unload goods from an ancient wooden cart with wooden wheels. The impression was of a plodding indefatigable and distant past that had crashed intact through barriers of time into its own future. I liked it.

The voice, Afghan matchmakers say, is more than half of love.

Sometimes, in India, you have to surrender before you win.

Alone is current in truth's river, like togetherness. Alone has its own fidelity. But when you navigate that closer view of the shore, it often seems that faith you have in yourself is all the faith there is.

What we call cowardice is often just another name for being taken by surprise, and courage is seldom any better than simply being well prepared.

I hesitated. Karla once said that men reveal what they think when they look away, and what they feel when they hesitate. With women, she said, it's the other way around.

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.

Slowly, desolately, the fist of what we'd done unclenched the clawed palm of what we'd become.

Love the truth that you find in the hearts of others. Always listen to the voice of love in your own heart

Gimme an honest frown over a false smile, any day.

But survival means more than simply being alive. It's not just the body that must survive a jail term: the spirit and the will and the heart have to make it through as well. If any one of them is broken or destroyed, the man whose living body walks through the gate, at the end of his sentence, can't be said to have survived it.

If you could be happy, really happy, for just a while, but you knew from the start that it would end in sadness, and bring pain afterwards, would you choose to have that happiness or would you avoid it?

It isn't a secret, unless keeping it hurts.

Poverty and pride are devoted blood brothers until one, always and inevitably, kills the other.

The only kingdom that makes any man a king is the kingdom of his own soul. The only power that has any real meaning is the power to better the world.

And money, if the pile gets high enough, is something like a big political party: it does as much harm as it does good, it puts too much power in too few hands, and the closer you come to it the dirtier you get.

Silences can wound as surely as the twisting lash.

I sometimes think that the size of our happiness is inversely proportional to the size of our house.

A dream is a place where a wish and a fear meet. When the wish and the fear are exactly the same we call the dream a nightmare.

Fear dries a man's mouth, and hate strangles him. That's why hate has no great literature: real fear and real hate have no words.

That's how we keep this crazy place together - with the heart. Two hundred fuckin' languages, and a billion people. India is the heart. It's the heart that keeps us together. There's no place with people like my people, Lin. There's no heart like the Indian heart.

Regret is a ghost of love. Regret is a nicer self that we send into the past from time to time, even though we know it's too late to change what we said, or did. We do it because it's human: a thing of our kind. We do it because we care, drawn by threads of shame that only fray and wither in the sea of regret.

Mistakes are like bad loves, the more you learn from, the more you wish they'd never happened.

It's said that you can never go home again, and it's true enough, of course. But the opposite is also true. You must go back, and you always go back, and you can never stop going back, no matter how hard you try.