Gregory David Roberts
Nothing ever fits the palm so perfectly, or feels so right, or inspires so much protective instinct as the hand of a childCollection: Children
A man is truly a man when he wins the love of a good woman, earns her respect, and keeps her trust. Until you can do that, you're not a man.Collection: Winning
Love is the passionate search for a truth other than your own; and once you feel it, honestly and completely, love is forever.Collection: Love Is
At first, when we truly love someone, our greatest fear is that the loved one will stop loving us. What we should fear and dread, of course, is that we won't stop loving them, even after they're dead and gone.Collection: Greatest Fear
There's no heart like the Indian heart.Collection: Heart
Ask people for help. You'll be all right. Don't worry. It's a great adventure, your life, and it has only just begun.Collection: Adventure
I look back, now, and I know that the naming moment, which seemed so insignificant then, which seemed to demand no more than an arbitrary and superstitious yes or no, was in fact a pivotal moment in my life.Collection: Demand
Civilization, after all, is defined by what we forbid, more than what we permit.Collection: Civilization
A politician is someone who promises a bridge even when there's no waterCollection: Bridges
We carry oceans inside of us, in our blood and our sweat. And we are crying the oceans, in our tears.Collection: Ocean
Prisons are the temples where devils learn to prey. Every time we turn the key we twist the knife of fate, because every time we cage a man we close him in with hate.Collection: Hate
justice is not only the way we punish those who do wrong. It is also the way we try to save them.Collection: Justice
There is no man, and no place, without war. The only thing we can do is choose a side, and fight. That is the only choice we get - who we fight for, who we fight against. That is life.Collection: War
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Running
That's how they manage to live together, a billion of them, in reasonable peace. They are not perfect, of course. They know how to fight and lie and cheat each other, and all the things that all of us do. But more than any other people in the world, the Indians know how to love one another.Collection: Lying
Heroes only come in three kinds:dead, damaged or dubious.Collection: Hero
Sometimes, you have to surrender before you win.Collection: Winning
Some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only loneliness can help you find them again.Collection: Loneliness
Of course I wanted to know. I was a writer. I wanted to know everything.Collection: Wanted
Let me explain something to you. Look around here. How many people do you count? Sixty, eighty, eighty people? Greeks, Germans, Italians, French, Americans. Tourists from everywhere. Eating, drinking, talking, laughing. And from Bombay - Indians and Iranians and Afghans and Arabs and Africans. But how many of these people have real power, real destiny, real dynamic for their place, and their time, and the lives of thousand of people? I will tell you - four. Four people in this room with power, and the rest are like the rest of the people everywhere: powerless, sleepers in the dream.Collection: Dream
They claim a hidden corner of our hearts, all those moments that stay with us unscreamed. That's where loves, like elephants, drag themselves to die. It's the place where pride allows itself to cry.Collection: Heart
You are not a man until you give your love, truly and freely to a child. And you are not a good man until you earn the love, truly and freely, of a child in return.Collection: Children
A city may be dirty on the outside but is clean on the inside. Many cities in the world are clean on the outside but dirty on the inside.Collection: Dirty
The best revenge, like the best sex, is performed slowly, and with the eyes open.Collection: Sex
every human heart beat is a universe of possibilities.Collection: Heart
While I was chained to a wall and being tortured, I realized, through the screaming of my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them. It doesn't sound like much, I know. But in the flinch and bite of the chain, when it's all you've got, that freedom is a universe of possibility. And the choice you make between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.Collection: Wall
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.Collection: Real
The truth is that there are no good men, or bad men,' he said. 'It is the deeds that have goodness or badness in them. There are good deeds, and bad deeds. Men are just men - it is what they do, or refuse to do, that links them to good and evil. The truth is that an instant of real love, in the heart of anyone - the noblest man alive or the most wicked - has the whole purpose and process and meaning of life within the lotus-folds of its passion. The truth is that we are all, every one of us, every atom, every galaxy, and every particle of matter in the universe, moving toward God.Collection: Real
A lot of bad stuff in the world wasn’t really that bad until someone tried to change it.Collection: World
Poverty and pride are devoted blood brothers until one, always and inevitably, kills the other.Collection: Brother
You can never tell what people have inside them until you start taking it away, one hope at a timeCollection: People
The most precious gift you can bring to your lover is your suffering.Collection: Suffering
If we can't respect the way we earn it, money has no value. If we can't use it to make life better for our families and loved ones, money has no purpose.Collection: Purpose
Sooner or later, fate puts us together with all the people, one by one, who show us what we could, and shouldn’t, let ourselves become. Sooner or later we meet the drunkard, the waster, the betrayer, the ruthless mind, and the hate-filled heart. But fate loads the dice, of course, because we usually find ourselves loving or pitying almost all of those people. And it’s impossible to despise someone you honestly pity, and to shun someone you truly love.Collection: Hate
The more you try to be like someone else, the more you find yourself standing in the way.Collection: Finding Yourself
Anything that can be put in a nut shell should remain there.Collection: Nuts
It isn't a secret, unless keeping it hurts.Collection: Hurt
Good soldiers are defined by what they can endure, not by what they can inflict.Collection: Soldier
hate has no literature: real fear and real hate have no wordsCollection: Hate
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.Collection: Party
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 .Collection: Struggle
The only force more ruthless and cynical than the business of big politics is the politics of big business.Collection: Cynical
Every virtuous act is inspired by a dark secret.Collection: Dark
Friendship is also a kind of medicine, and the markets for it, too, are sometimes black.Collection: Medicine
We live on because we can love, and we love because we can forgive.Collection: Forgiving
I don't know what frightens me moreCollection: Shantaram
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.Collection: Real
There’s too much love in the world. Sometimes I think that’s what heaven is---- a place where everybody’s happy because nobody loves anybody else, ever.Collection: Thinking