Browsing Quotes By Gregory David Roberts, page 3
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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 founding 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.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 9:39 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Guilt is the hilt of the knife that we use on ourselves, and love is often the blade; but it’s worry that keeps the knife sharp, and worry that gets most of us, in the end.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 9:37 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Hey guys, I wanted to say, can’t you be a little more original? But I couldn’t speak. Fear dries a man’s mouth, and hate strangles him. That’s why hate has no great literature: real fear and real hate have no words.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 9:35 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
I heard a warning, deep within – we usually do, when something worse than we can imagine is stalking us, and set to pounce. Fate’s way of beating us in a fair fight is to give us warnings that we hear, but never heed.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 9:34 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
The devil, they say, is in the details, and I knew well the devils that lurked and skulked in the details of my own story. But she had given me a hoard of new treasures. I’d learned more about here in that exhausted, murmuring hour than in all the many months before it. Lovers find their way by such insights and confidences: they’re the stars we use to navigate the ocean of desire. And the brightest of those stars are the heartbreaks and sorrows. The most precious gift you can bring to your lover is your suffering. So I took each sadness she confessed to me, and pinned it to the sky.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 9:33 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“There’s no meanness too spiteful or too cruel,” Didier once said to me, “when we hate someone for all the wrong reasons.”
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 9:30 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
One of the ironies of courage, and the reason why we prize it so highly, is that we find it easier to be brave for someone else than we do for ourselves alone.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 9:29 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
It’s a characteristic of human nature that the best qualities, called up quickly in a crisis, are very often the hardest to find in a prosperous calm. The contours of all our virtues are shaped by adversity.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 9:28 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Didier, trying to warn me, trying to help me or save me, perhaps, had said once that nothing grieves more deeply or pathetically than one half of a great love that isn’t meant to be. And he was right, of course, up to a point.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 9:16 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
I sat alone, on a boulder that was larger and flatter than most, and I smoked a cigarette. I smoked in those days because, like everyone else in the world who smokes, I wanted to die at least as much as I wanted to live.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 9:14 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“What characterizes the human race more,” Karla once asked me, “cruelty, or the capacity to feel shame for it?” I thought the question acutely clever then, when I first heard it, but I’m lonelier and wiser now, and I know it isn’t cruelty or shame that characterizes the human race. It’s forgiveness that makes us what we are. Without forgiveness, our species would’ve annihilated itself in endless retributions. Without forgiveness, there would be no history. Without that hope, there would be no art, for every work of art is in some way an act of forgiveness. Without that dream, there would be no love, for every act of love is in some way a promise to forgive. We live on because we can love, and we love because we can forgive.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 9:13 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
He couldn’t know it, of course; but with that simple nod of his head, Joseph had answered the question that had remained with me, as a dull ache of doubt, since the prison. Joseph was saved. That was the look simmering in his eyes as he nodded his head. It was the fever of salvation. That look, that frowning smile, combined shame and exultation because both are essential – shame gives exultation its purpose and exultation gives shame its reward. We’d saved him as much by joining in his exultation as we had by witnessing his shame. And all of it depended upon our action, our interference in his life, because no man is saved without love.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 9:12 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“We have a saying, in the Pashto language, and the meaning of it is that 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.”
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 9:10 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope. Sometimes we cry with everything except tears. In the end that’s all there is: love and its duty, sorrow and its truth. In the end that’s all we have – to hold on tight until the dawn.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 9:09 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“I thought you didn’t like kids.”
“I don’t. They’re so …innocent. Except they’re not. They know exactly what they want, and they don’t stop till they get it. It’s disgusting. All the worst people I know are just like big, grown-up children.”Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 9:08 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
I shook hands with him, his small hand vanishing in mine. Nothing ever fits the palm so perfectly, or feels so right, or inspires so much protective instinct as the hand of a child.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 9:08 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“I don’t know what scares me more,” she declared, “the madness that smashes people down, or their ability to endure it.”
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I don’t know what frightens me more, the power that crushes us or our endless ability to endure it.Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 9:07 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“In this way justice is done,” Quasim Ali said that night, his bark-colored eyes softening on the two young men, “because justice is a judgment that is both fair and forgiving. Justice is not done until everyone is satisfied, even those who offend us and must be punished by us. 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.”
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 9:06 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“Suffering,” Khaderbhai once told me, “is the way we test our love, especially our love for God.”
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 9:04 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“I said that the truth is found more often in music,” he repeated, “than it is in books of philosophy.”
“What is the truth?” I asked him. I didn’t really want to know. I was trying to hold up my end of the conversation. I was trying to be clever.
“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.”Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 9:04 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment!