Browsing Quotes By Gregory David Roberts, page 2
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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! -
“There is nothing so depressing as good advice, and I will be pleased if you do not inflict it upon me. Frankly, I am shocked at you. You must know this, surely? Some years ago I suffered such an offensively gratuitous piece of good advice that I was depressed for six months afterward. It was a very close call – I almost never recovered.”
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 9:49 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“I love you, Karla,” I said when we were alone again. “I loved you the first second I saw you. I think I’ve loved you for as long as there’s been love in the world. I love your voice. I love your face. I love your hands. I love everything you do, and I love the way you do everything. It feels like magic when you touch me. I love the way your mind works, and the things you say. And even though it’s all true, all that, I don’t really understand it, and I can’t explain it – to you or to myself. I just love you. I just love you with all my heart. You do what God should do: you give me a reason to live. You give me a reason to love the world.”
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 9:48 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“I’m not so sure. I think a lot of people have stopped believing in love.”
“People haven’t stopped believing in love. They haven’t stopped wanting to be in love. They just don’t believe in a happy ending anymore. They still believe in love, and falling in love, but they know now that… they know that romances almost never end as well as they begin.”Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 9:46 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
The sound of her voice and the sight of her face pulled all the air from my lungs, and set my hear thumping. So much had happened since the last time I’d seen her, the first time we’d made love, that a fevered squall of emotion stung my eyes. If I’d been a different man, a better man, I would’ve cried. And who knows, it might’ve made a difference.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 9:45 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
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.”
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 9:43 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“Wherever you go in the world, in any society, it is always the same when it comes to questions of justice,” lord Abdel Khader Khan, my mafia boss and my surrogate father, told me when I’d been six months in his service. “We concentrate our laws, investigations, prosecutions, and punishments on how much crime is in the sin, rather than how much sin is in the crime.
“…For me,” he went on as we ate, “the opposite is true. For me, the most important thing is the amount of sin that is in the crime. You asked me, just now, why we do not make money from prostitution and drugs, as the other councils do, and I tell you it is because of the sin that is in those crimes. It is for this reason that I will not sell children, or women, or pornography, or drugs. It is for this reason that I will not permit those businesses in any of my areas. In all of these things, the sin in the crime is so great that a man must give up his soul for the profit he makes. And if a man gives his soul, if he becomes a soul-less man, it takes nothing less than a miracle for him to regain it.”Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 9:42 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
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.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 9:40 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“Is love, yes, when a terrible feeling makes you happy? When you worry about a girl. More even than you worry about your taxi? That’s love, isn’t it? A great love, isn’t it?”
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 9:40 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment!