Gregory David Roberts Quotes & Sayings

It doesnt always help us to love the world,but it does prevent us from hating the world. — Gregory David Roberts

When we get older - when the steel door slams shut, in one way or another - we know that real suffering is measured by what's taken away from us. — Gregory David Roberts

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

You can't serve God with a gun. — Gregory David Roberts

Anything that inhibits, impedes, or prevents this movement toward the Ultimate Complexity is evil. The wonderful thing about this definition of good and evil is that it is both objective and universally acceptable. — Gregory David Roberts

When you judge the power that is in a person, you must judge their capacities as both friend and as enemy. — Gregory David Roberts

We know who we are and we define what we are by references to the people we love and our reasons for loving them. — Gregory David Roberts

Of course I wanted to know. I was a writer. I wanted to know everything. — Gregory David Roberts

If you stare into its cold dead eye, the camera always mocks you with the truth. — Gregory David Roberts

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

The clue to everything a man should love and fear in her was there right from the start in the ironic smile that primed and swelled the archery of her full lips. There was pride in that smile and confidence in the set of her fine nose. Without understanding why I knew beyond question that a lot of people would mistake her pride for arrogance and confuse her confidence with impassivity. I didn't make that mistake. My eyes were lost swimming floating free in the shimmering lagoon of her steady even stare. Her eyes were large and spectacularly green. It was the green that trees are in vivid dreams. It was the green that the sea would be if the sea were perfect. — Gregory David Roberts

It was the desolate terror of a man who knows that fate has abandoned him, and death's already inside, stretching and swelling and filling up the life-space that used to be his. It — Gregory David Roberts

I began to see how deep the well of her loving was, and how much her happiness and confidence depended on drawing that love into the light, and sharing it. And love was beautiful in her. It was a clear sky she gave us with those eyes, and a summer morning with her smile. — Gregory David Roberts

Is easy
suffering is hungry, isn't it? Hungry, for anything, means suffering. Not hungry for something, means, not suffering. But everybody knows that. — Gregory David Roberts

I take everything personally - that's what being a person is all about. — Gregory David Roberts

God help us. God forgive us. We live on. — Gregory David Roberts

I'd developed a style in dealing with foreigners that won their trust quickly. That style was two parts showman, two parts flatterer, and one part philanderer, combined with a hint of mischief, a sniff of condescension, and a pinch of contempt. — Gregory David Roberts

I would say that it is different for all of us, but that it happens when we grow up, when we mature and pass from the childishness of our youthful tears, and become adults. I think that it is a part of growing up, learning to control our suffering. I think that when we grow up, and learn that happiness is rare, and passes quickly, we become disillusioned and hurt. And how much we suffer is a mark of how much we have been hurt by this realisation. Suffering, you see, is a kind of anger. We rage against the unfairness, the injustice of our sad and sorry lot. And this boiling resentment, you see, this anger, is what we call suffering. It is also what leads us to the hero curse, I might add. — Gregory David Roberts

In the storm-lit darkness, the beaded sweat and raindrops on her arm were like so many glittering stars, and her skin was like a span of night sky. — Gregory David Roberts

Good doctors have at least three things in common: they know how to observe, they know how to listen, and they're very tired. — Gregory David Roberts

There is another reality, beyond what we see with our eyes. You have to feel your way into that reality with your heart. There is no other way. — Gregory David Roberts

Khaled, my first teacher, was the kind of man who carried his past in the temple fires of his eyes, and fed the flames with pieces of his broken heart. I've known men like Khaled in prisons, on battlefields, and in the dens where smugglers, mercenaries, and other exiles meet. They all have certain characteristics in common. They're tough, because there's a kind of toughness that's found in the worst sorrow. They're honest, because the truth of what happened to them won't let them lie. They're angry, because they can't forget the past or forgive it. And they're lonely. 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; and those like Khaled, who find themselves marooned there, are always alone. — Gregory David Roberts

I hate it when people take so long to drink a single glass. IT is like putting on a condom to masturbate. — Gregory David Roberts

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. — Gregory David Roberts

Happiness is a myth. It was invented to make us buy new things. — Gregory David Roberts

Sometimes you break your heart in the right way, if you know what I mean. — Gregory David Roberts

What we tell, is rarely what we do. — Gregory David Roberts

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. — Gregory David Roberts

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. — Gregory David Roberts

It is always a fool's mistake, Didier once said to me, to be alone with someone you shouldn't have loved. — Gregory David Roberts

Her eyes were the color of the sea if the sea were perfect. — Gregory David Roberts

I couldn't tell him that I felt too weak and beat up to climb a mountain: sometimes, all the guts you have is the guts you pretend, because you love someone too much to lose their respect. — Gregory David Roberts

A man trusts another man when he sees enough of himself in him. — Gregory David Roberts

I let my eyes drift into the maze of leaves that only trees understand. Hatred has its gravitational web, locking stray specks of confusion into spirals of violence. — Gregory David Roberts

I sometimes think that the size of our happiness is inversely proportional to the size of our house. — Gregory David Roberts

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. — Gregory David Roberts

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. — Gregory David Roberts

The heart doesn't know how to quit, because it doesn't know how to lie. — Gregory David Roberts

When you know you're going to die, there's no comfort in cleverness. Genius is vain, and cleverness is hollow, at the end. — Gregory David Roberts

The cops watched me and the Georges and the other foreigners who worked the streets, and they knew exactly what we were doing. They reasoned, truly enough, that we caused no violent harm, and we were good for business in the black market that brought them bribes and other benefits. They took their cut from the drug and currency dealers. They left us alone. They left me alone. — Gregory David Roberts

I hate it all,' I sighed, sure in my own mind that the new war would change nothing: that wars can't really change things. It's peace that makes the deepest cuts, I thought. — Gregory David Roberts

There are no mistakes. Only new paths to explore. — Gregory David Roberts

You know the difference between news and gossip, don't you? News tells you what people did. Gossip tells you how much they enjoyed it. — Gregory David Roberts

There's a truth that's deeper than experience. It's beyond what we see, or even what we feel. It's an order of truth that separates the profound from the merely clever, and the reality from the perception. — Gregory David Roberts

She was a river, not a stone, and every day was another curve in tomorrow's plain. She was pulled from a family she loved, and that loved her, she thought, until they took the word of a man, a friend and neighbour, who raped her. Years later, when she killed the rapist and went on the run, she severed every connection to her own life. She was runaway tough, a dancing cat, a green witch, and safe from everything but herself, like me. — Gregory David Roberts

The moon, our lonely sister, filters pain and harm from sunlight, and reflects it back to us safely, free of burn and blemish. We danced in moonlight on the balcony that night, Oleg and I, and we sang and shouted and laughed, hardening ourselves to what we'd done in life, and what we'd lost. And the moon graced two fallen fools, on a fallen day, with sunlight purified by a mirror in the sky, made of stone. — Gregory David Roberts

The only force more ruthless and cynical than the business of big politics is the politics of big business. — Gregory David Roberts

Indian actors know how to shout with the eyes. — Gregory David Roberts

Sometimes the river of life takes you to the rocks. The letter, — Gregory David Roberts

Fanaticism means that if you're not against me, you're against me. — Gregory David Roberts

It's isn't a secret, unless keeping it hurts. — Gregory David Roberts

Her eyes were large and spectacularly green. It was the green that trees are, in vivid dreams. It was the green that the sea would be, if the sea were perfect. Her — Gregory David Roberts

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

'Well she is wrong!' he declared...'There are many animals that can express their happiness, but only the human animal has the genius to express a magnificent sadness. And for me it is something special; a daily meditation. Sadness is my one and my only art.' - Didier — Gregory David Roberts

If you know bikes at all, you can tell a lot about a man by how he rides. Abdullah rode from reflex rather than concentration. His control of the bike in motion was as natural as his control of his legs in walking. He read the traffic with a mix of skill and intuition. Several times, he slowed before there was an obvious need, and avoided the hard braking that other, less instinctive riders were forced to make. Sometimes he accelerated into an invisible gap that opened magically for us, just when a collision seemed imminent. Although unnerving at first, the technique did soon inspire a kind of grudging confidence in me, and I relaxed in the ride. — Gregory David Roberts

Waiting for nothing, that is what kills the heart of a man, isn't it? — Gregory David Roberts

Now sadly there is attitude and no style. — Gregory David Roberts

Loyalty is something you need for things you don't love enough. When you love enough, loyalty isn't even a question. — Gregory David Roberts

Gimme an honest frown over a false smile, any day. — Gregory David Roberts

A business suit, Didier once said to me, is nothing but a military uniform, stripped of its honour. And — Gregory David Roberts

I think it is a part of growing up, learning to control our suffering. — Gregory David Roberts

No matter how often or deeply I thought about the struggled past or the sorrow and promise of the present, I couldn't make that leap of confidence or trust or faith into the future. There was something missing: some calculation, some piece of evidence or parallax view of my life that would make it all clear to me, I was sure, but I didn't know what it was. — Gregory David Roberts

The only victory that really counts in prison is survival. 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. 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. — Gregory David Roberts

The drums staggered toward the distant street. Moving away from us, the dancers romped and rolled on the rhythm, their swaying heads like a field of wildflowers weaving back and forth on waves of wind. As the music dwindled to an echo in our minds, the day-to-day and minute-to-minute of slum life slowly reclaimed the lanes. We gave ourselves to our routines, our needs, and our harmless, hopeful scheming. And for a while, a little while, ours was a better world because the hearts and smiles that ruled it were almost as pure and clean as the flower petals fluttering from our hair, and clinging to our faces like still, white tears. — Gregory David Roberts

The strength and wildness and will that I found in him were more and better than all the truth and goodness in the world. I pledged myself to him as brother and friend no matter what he'd done and no matter what he was. — Gregory David Roberts

I looked in the mirror once more. The new clothes felt like salt on the raw wounds, but they covered the worst of it, and I looked less alarming, less confronting, less hideous. I smiled at the mirror. I was practising, trying to remember what it was like to be me. — Gregory David Roberts

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 . — Gregory David Roberts

MEN WAGE WARS for profit and principle, but they fight them for land and women. Sooner or later, the other causes and compelling reasons drown in blood and lose their meaning. Sooner or later, death and survival clog the senses. Sooner or later, surviving is the only logic, and dying is the only voice and vision. Then, when best friends die screaming, and good men maddened with pain and fury lose their minds in the bloody pit, when all the fairness and justice and beauty in the world is blown away with arms and legs and heads of brothers and sons and fathers, then, what makes men fight on, and die, and keep on dying, year after year, is the will to protect the land and the women. — Gregory David Roberts

I don't know what scares me more,' she declared, 'the madness that smashes people down, or their ability to endure it. — Gregory David Roberts

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. — Gregory David Roberts

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. — Gregory David Roberts

with the words, but hearing them in — Gregory David Roberts

There's a dark feeling - less than hatred, but more than loathing - that ugly men feel for handsome men. It's unreasonable and unjustified, of course, but it's always there, hiding in the long shadow thrown by envy. It creeps out, into the light of your eyes, when you're falling in love with a beautiful woman. — Gregory David Roberts

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. — Gregory David Roberts

The amount of force and violence necessary to board the train, for example was no less and no more than the amoount of politeness and consideration necessary to ensure that the cramped journey was as pleasant as possible afterwards. What is necessary? That was the unspoken but implied, and unavoidable question everywhere in India. — Gregory David Roberts

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. — Gregory David Roberts

I joked and laughed about things that made other less wounded hearts weep, and I'd learned to harden myself against loss and death. — Gregory David Roberts

Glory belongs to God, of course; that's what the word really means. And you can't serve God with a gun. — Gregory David Roberts

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. — Gregory David Roberts

A politician is someone who promises a bridge even when there's no water — Gregory David Roberts

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. — Gregory David Roberts

Love is the opposite of power. That's why we fear it so much. — Gregory David Roberts

At first, on that first journey out of the city into India, I found such sudden politeness infuriating after the violent scramble to board the train. It seemed hypocritical for them to show such deferential concern over a nudge with a foot when, minutes before, they'd all but pushed one another out of the windows. — Gregory David Roberts

Luck is what happens to you when fate gets tired of waiting — Gregory David Roberts

I've been to Delhi, Madras, Bangalore and a lot of other cities, but I have never seen a crime set-up like that in Bombay. — Gregory David Roberts

I think that we all, each one of us, we all have to earn our future. — Gregory David Roberts

Crying isn't a weakness, but a kind of strength. — Gregory David Roberts

Like most things, and most people, it's not as bad as it looks from the outside. — Gregory David Roberts

He was the little mouse that I'd trained and fed with crumbs in my prison cell; the mouse that was crucified. — Gregory David Roberts

People say that love is the best thing in the world not power. But they are wrong. Love is the opposite of power and that's why we fear it so much. — Gregory David Roberts

Baptised by the sky, the world was born again, and hope washed a year's dust and blood from the mountain. — Gregory David Roberts

Into trouble we didn't need. And I tried to talk Khaderbhai out of it. I tried to get them to stop. But I didn't feel anything about it, even when they killed Madjid. And I . . . I used to like him, you know? I liked old Madjid. He was the best of them, in a way. But I didn't feel anything when he died. And I didn't feel it, not even a bit, when Khader told me he had to leave you in jail and let you get beaten up. I liked you - more than I liked anyone else - but I didn't feel bad or sorry. I kind of understood it - that it had to happen, and it was just bad luck that it was happening to you. I felt nothing. And that's when it hit me - that's when I knew I had to get away. — Gregory David Roberts

But I was alone, and for two reasons: The mafia was theirs, not mine. For them, the organisation always came first. But I was loyal to the men, not the mafia; to the brothers, not the brotherhood. I worked for the mafia, but I didn't join it. I'm not a joiner. I never found a club or clan or idea that was more important to me than the men and women who believed in it. — Gregory David Roberts

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. — Gregory David Roberts

You can respect a man's rights or opinions without knowing the man at all. But you can only respect the man himself when you find something in him that's worthy of the word. — Gregory David Roberts

Most loves are like that, from what I can see. Your heart starts to feel like an overcrowded lifeboat. You throw your pride out to keep it afloat, and your self-respect and your independence. After a while you start throwing people out - your friends, everyone you used to know. And it's still not enough. The lifeboat is still sinking, and you know it's going to take you down with it. — Gregory David Roberts

Love unlived is a sin against life, and mourning is one of the ways we love. I felt it then, and I let it happen, the longing for him to return. The power in his eyes, and the pride when I did something he admired, and the love in his laugh. The longing: the longing for the lost. — Gregory David Roberts

The world is run by one million evil men, ten million stupid men, and a hundred million cowards. — Gregory David Roberts

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. And it's the same place where those feelings and ideals die. That suffering never stops. We only pretend it does. We only tell ourselves it does, to make the kids stop whimpering in their sleep. — Gregory David Roberts

Fate needs accomplices, and the stones in destiny's walls are mortared with small and heedless complicities such as those. — Gregory David Roberts

the student is ready, the teacher appears - do — Gregory David Roberts