Puck's Quote Board, page 74
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I couldn’t face the loss of Khaderbhai, my father-dream. I’d helped to bury him, for God’s sake, with my own hands. But I didn’t grieve, and I didn’t mourn him. There wasn’t enough truth in me for that kind of sorrowing because my heart wouldn’t believe him dead. I’d loved him too much, it seemed to me in that winter of war, for him to simply be gone, to be dead. If so much love could vanish into the earth and speak no more, smile no more, then love was nothing. And I wouldn’t believe that. 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.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:27 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
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 woman.
You know that’s true when you listen to them, in the hours before they go into battle. They talk about home, and they talk about the women they love. And you know it’s true when you watch them die. If he’s near the earth or on the earth in the last moments, a dying man reaches out for it, to squeeze a grasp of soil in his hand. If he can, he’ll raise his head to look at the mountain, the valley, or the plain. If he’s a long way from home, he’ll think about it, and he’ll talk about it. He’ll talk about his village, or his home town, or the city where he grew up. The land matters, at the end. And at the very last, he won’t scream of causes. At the very last, he’ll murmur or he’ll cry out the name of a sister or a daughter or a lover or a mother, even as he speaks the name of his God. The end mirrors the beginning. In the end, it’s a woman, and a city.Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:26 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
They’d lied to me and betrayed me, leaving jagged edges where all my trust had been, and I didn’t like or respect or admire them any more, but still I loved them. I had no choice. I understood that, perfectly, standing in the white wilderness of snow. You can’t kill love. You can’t even kill it with hate. You can kill in-love, and loving, and even loveliness. You can kill them all, or numb them into dense, leaden regret, but you can’t kill love itself. Love is the passionate search for a truth other than your own; and once you feel it, honestly and completely, love is forever. Every act of love, every moment of the heart reaching out, is a part of the universal good: it’s a part of God, or what we call God, and it can never die.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:26 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“Remember,” Khader said insistently, resting his hand on my forearm to emphasize his words. “Sometimes it is necessary to do the wrong thing for the right reasons. The important thing is to be sure that our reasons are right, and that we admit the wrong – that we do not lie to ourselves, and convince ourselves that what we do is right.”
…Once before he’d tormented me with that phrase. I chewed at it, in my mind, as a bear will chew at a leather strap that binds it by the leg. In my life, the wrong things were almost always done for the wrong reasons. Even the right things that I did were too often goaded by the wrong reasons.Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:25 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
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.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:19 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“I don’t know. My friend Didier says that praising people behind their back is monstrously unfair, because the one thing you can’t defend yourself against is the good that people say about you.”
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:10 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
The tears, when they come to some men, are worse than beatings. They’re wounded worse by sobbing, men like that, than they are by boots and batons. Tears begin in the heart, but some of us deny the heart so often, and for so long, that when it speaks we hear not one but a hundred sorrows in the heartbreak. We know that crying is a good and natural thing. We now that crying isn’t a weakness, but a kind of strength. Still, the weeping rips us root by tangled root from the earth, and we crash like fallen trees when we cry.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 10:08 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
A mujaheddin fighter once told me that fate gives all of us three teachers, three friends, three enemies, and three great loves in our lives. But these twelve are always disguised, and we can never know which one is which until we’ve loved them, left them, or fought them. Khader was one of my twelve, but his disguise was always the best. In those abandoned, angry days, as my grieving heart limped into numbing despair, I began to think of him as my enemy; my beloved enemy.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 10:06 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
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. For I still love you with the whole of my heart, Prabaker. I still love you. And sometimes, my friend, the love that I have, and can’t give to you, crushes the breath from my chest. Sometimes, even now, my heart is drowning in a sorrow that has no stars without you, and no laughter, and no sleep.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 10:06 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“Fanaticism is the opposite of love,” I said, recalling one of Khaderbhai’s lectures. “A wise man once told me – he’s a Muslim, by the way – that he has more in common with a rational, reasonable-minded Jew than he does with a fanatic from his own religion. He has more in common with a rational, reasonable-minded Christian or Buddhist or Hindu than he does with a fanatic from his own religion. In fact, he has more in common with a rational, reasonable-minded atheist than he does with a fanatic from his own religion. I agree with him, and I feel the same way. I also agree with Winston Churchill , who once defined a fanatic as someone who won’t change his mind and can’t change the subject.”
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 10:05 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“Lin, a man has to find a good woman, and when he finds her he has to win her love. Then he has to earn her respect. Then he has to cherish her trust. And then he has to, like, go on doing that for as long as they live. Until they both die. That’s what it’s all about. That’s the most important thing in the world. That’s what man is, yaar. 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.”
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 10:03 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Khaderbhai once said that if we envy someone for all the right reasons, we’re half way to wisdom. I hope he wasn’t right about that. I hope good envy takes you further than that, because a lifetime has passed since that day at the wire, and I still envy Anand’s calm communion with fate, and I long for it with all my flawed and striving heart.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 10:02 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Everything you ever sense, in touch or taste or sight or even thought, has an effect on you that’s greater than zero. Some things, like the background sound of a bird chirping as it passes your house in the evening, or a flower glimpsed out of the corner of an eye, have such an infinitesimally small effect that you can’t detect them. Some things, like triumph and heartbreak, and some images, like the image of yourself reflected in the eyes of a man you’ve just stabbed, attach themselves to the secret gallery and change your life forever.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 10:01 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Everything you ever sense, in touch or taste or sight or even thought, has an effect on you that’s greater than zero. Some things, like the background sound of a bird chirping as it passes your house in the evening, or a flower glimpsed out of the corner of an eye, have such an infinitesimally small effect that you can’t detect them. Some things, like triumph and heartbreak, and some images, like the image of yourself reflected in the eyes of a man you’ve just stabbed, attach themselves to the secret gallery and change your life forever.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 10:01 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
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. And in those sleep-lonely nights and thing-rambled days, Modena’s face was always there, staring at the door.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 10:00 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
You can never tell what people have inside them until you start taking it away, one hope at a time.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 9:54 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
A Dutch mercenary in Kinshasa once told me that the only time he ever stopped hating himself was when the risk he faced became so great that he acted without thinking or feeling anything at all. I wished he hadn’t said it to me because I knew exactly what he meant. And I rode that night, I soared that night, and the stillness in my heart was almost like being at peace.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 9:54 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
I didn’t answer her. Of course I missed him. He was a good kid. I missed my daughter. I missed my mother and all of my family. I missed my friends: I missed them all and I was sure, in those desperate years, that I would never see them again. Missing the people I loved was a kind of grieving for me, and it was worse, much worse, for the fact that – so far as I knew – they weren’t dead. My heart, sometimes, was a graveyard full of blank stones. And when I was alone in my apartment, night after night, that grieving and missing choked me. There was money in bundles on the dressing table, and there were passports freshly forged that could send me… anywhere. But there was nowhere to go: nowhere that wasn’t emptied of meaning and identity and love by the vacuum of those who were missing and lost forever.
I was the fugitive. I was the vanished one. I was the one who was missing: missing in action. But inside slipstream of my flight, they were the missing ones. Inside my exile, it was the whole world I once knew that was missing. The fugitive kind run, trying against their hearts to annihilate the past, and with it every tell-tale trace of what they were, where they came from, and those who once loved them. And they run into that extinction of themselves, to survive, but they always fail. We can deny the past, but we can’t escape its torment because the past is a speaking shadow that keeps pace with the truth of what we are, step for step, until we die.Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 9:53 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Khaderbhai once said that every virtuous act is inspired by a dark secret. It mightn’t be true of everyone, but it was true enough about me. The little good that I’ve done in the world has always dragged behind it a shadow of dark inspiration. What I do know now, and didn’t know then is that, in the long run, motive matters more with good deeds than it does with bad. When all the guilt and shame for the bad we’ve done have run their course, it’s the good we did that can save us. But then, when salvation speaks, the secrets we kept, and the motives we concealed, creep from their shadows. They cling to us, those dark motives for our good deeds. Redemption’s climb is steepest if the good we did is soiled with secret shame.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 9:51 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“For all his wisdom, he did not know that love cannot be tested. Honesty can be tested, and loyalty. But there is no test for love. Love goes on forever, once it begins, even if we come to hate the one we love. Love goes on forever because love is born in the part of us that does not die.”
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 9:49 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment!