Quotes from Gregory David Roberts

The ancient Sanskrit legends speak of a destined love, a karmic connection between souls that are fated to meet and collide and enrapture one another. The legends say that the loved one is instantly recognised because she's loved in every gesture, every expression of thought, every movement, every sound, and every mood that prays in her eyes. The legends say that we know her by her wings - the wings that only we can see - and because wanting her kills every other desire of love.

If fate doesn't make you laugh, Karla said, in one of my first conversations with her, then you just don't get the joke.

Civilisation, after all, is defined by what we forbid, more than what we permit.

Most of us pretend, with greater or lesser success, that the minute we live in is something we can share. But the past for every one of us is a desert island.

So when will be the time to get on the train? I think.....a little bit almost quite very soon and not long.

Fate always gives you two choices, Scorpio George once said: the one you should take, and the one you do.

La sencilla y sorprendente verdad sobre la India y sobre su gente es que cuando vas a su país y tratas con ellos, el corazón siempre te guía más sabiamente que la cabeza. No hay lugar en el mundo donde eso sea más cierto.

Fear and guilt are the dark angels that haunt rich men, Khader said to me once. I wasn't sure if that was true, or if he simply wanted it to be true, but I did know from experience that despair and humiliation haunt the poor.

Every human heartbeat, he's said many times, is a universe of possibilities.

Indian actors know how to shout with the eyes.

You can see, by what we have done with these two boys, that justice is not only the way we punish those who do wrong. It is also the way we try to save them.

What dream, what hope, what despair drives us to the things we do, just to desert us when the deed is done? What hollow things are they, motive and reason, born at night to fade so quickly in the sunlight of consequence? What we do in life lives on inside us, long after ambition and fear lie frosted and opaqued on forgotten shores. What we do in life, more than what we think or say, is what we are.

It's a fact of life on the run that you often love more people than you trust.

I was sure there had to be a pay-off, somehow, and I kept waiting for it. 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.

Religion is just a long competition to see who can design the silliest hat.

I know now that it's the sweet, sweating smell of hope, which is opposite of hate; and it's the sour, stifled smell of greed, which is the opposite of love.

None of us lie or guard our secrets when we sing, and India is a nation of singers whose first love is the kind of song we turn to when crying just isn't enough.

When the heart has its moment of truth & sorrow, the soul can't be stilled.

Jealousy, like the flawed love that bears it, has no respect for time or space or wisely reasoned argument. Jealousy can raise the dead with a single, spiteful taunt, or hate a perfect stranger for nothing more than the sound of his name.

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.

No-one, and nothing, could make me very happy. I was tough, which is probably the saddest thing you can say about a man.

There are few things more discomfiting than a spontaneous outburst of genuine decency from someone you're determined to dislike for no good reason.

depression only happens to people who don't know how to be sad.

almost everyone I've ever loved is dead. And the only way to live with the constant cull of what you love is to take a little of that cold grave into yourself, every time.