Browsing Quotes By Gregory David Roberts, page 4
-
“It is strange, at first, to think in the right way. But there are a few things we can know, a few things to be sure of, and it is relatively easy. Let me show you. To know the truth, all you have to do is close your eyes.”
“It’s that easy?” I laughed.
“Yes. All you have to do is close your eyes. We can know God, for example, and we can know sadness. We can know dreams, and we can know love. But none of these are real, in our usual sense of things that exist in the world and seem real. We cannot weigh them, or measure their length, or find their basic parts in an atom smasher. Which is why they are possible.”Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 9:00 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“Fate has every power over us, but two. Fate cannot control our free will, and fate cannot lie. Men lie, to themselves more than to others, and to others more often then they tell the truth. But fate does not lie.”
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:59 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“There is no believing in God,” he declared, smiling again. “We either know God, or we do not.”
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:58 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“There is no act of faith more beautiful than the generosity of the very poor.”
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:57 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
One of the reasons why we crave love, and seek it so desperately, is that love is the only cure or loneliness, and shame, and sorrow. But some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only loneliness can help you find them again. Some truths about yourself are so painful that only shame can help you live with them. And some things are just so sad that only your soul can do the crying for you.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:56 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
There’s a kind of luck that’s not much more than being in the right place at the right time, a kind of inspiration that’s not much more than doing the right thing in the right way, and both only really happen to you when you empty your heart of ambition, purpose, and plan; when you give yourself, completely, to the golden, fate-filled moment.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:55 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
We all turned to stare at her. The table was silent. We were stunned to hear such sentiments expressed by a young woman who made her living as the sexual plaything of those Indians who were rich enough to exploit her. She was used and abused, and I, for one, would’ve expected her to be more cynical. Optimism is the first cousin of love, and it’s exactly like love in three ways: it’s pushy, it has no real sense of humor, and it turns up where you least expect it.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:54 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“Fanatics,” Didier mused, ignoring the rebuke, “always seem to have the same scrubbed and staring look about them. They have the look of people who do not masturbate, but who think about it almost all the time.”
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:53 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“She loved the guy. She did it for him. She would’ve done anything for him. Some women are like that. Some loves are like that. 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. I’ve seen that happen to a lot of girls here. I think that’s why I’m sick of love.”
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:52 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“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.”
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:52 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“I wouldn’t take too much notice of what Didier says. He can be very superficial, especially when he’s being serious. He’s the kind who gets right down to the skin of things, if you know what I mean. I told him once he’s so shallow that the best he can manage is a single entendre. The funny thing is, he liked it. I’ll say this for Didier, you can’t insult him.”
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:51 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
We walked slowly. I looked up often at the sky, so heavy with stars that the black net of night was bulging, overflowing with its glittering haul. Imprisonment meant years without a sunrise, a sunset, or a night sky, locked in a cell for sixteen hours each day, from early afternoon to late morning. Imprisonment meant that they took away the sun and the moon and the stars. Prison wasn’t hell, but there was no heaven in it, either. In its own way, that was just as bad.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:50 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
One of the reasons I remember those early Bombay months so well is that, whenever I was alone, I wrote about those new friends and the conversations we shared. And writing was one of the things that saved me: the discipline and abstraction of putting my life into words, every day, helped me to cope with shame and its first cousin, despair.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:48 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“Tell us Lin. I would like to know.”
“Well, if you press me, I’d have to say freedom.”
“The freedom to do what?” he asked, putting a little laugh in the last word.
“I don’t know. Maybe just the freedom to say no. If you’ve got that much freedom, you really don’t need any more.”Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:47 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“You’re a good listener. That’s dangerous, because it’s so hard to resist. Being listened to – really listened to – is the second-best thing in the world.”
“What’s the first best thing?”
“Everybody knows that. The best thing in the world is power.”
“Oh, is it?” I asked, laughing. “What about sex?”
“No. Apart from biology, sex is all about power. That’s why it’s such a rush.”
I laughed again.
“And what about love? A lot of people say that love is the best thing in the world, not power.”
“They’re wrong,” she said with terse finality. “Love is the opposite of power. That’s why we fear it so much.”Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:46 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
I was numb, in those first years after the escape: shell-shocked by the disasters that warred in my life. My heart moved through deep and silent water. No-one, and nothing, could really hurt me. No-one, and nothing, could make me very happy. I was tough, which is probably the saddest thing you can say about a man.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:45 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“The world and I are not on speaking terms,” Karla said to me once in those early months. “The world keeps trying to win me back, she said, bit it doesn’t work. I guess I’m just not the forgiving type.”
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:45 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
The past reflects eternally between two mirrors – the bright mirror of words and deeds, and the dark one, full of things we didn’t do or say. I wish now that from the beginning, even then in the first weeks that I knew her, even on that night, the words had come to tell her… to tell her that I liked her.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:43 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
The contrast between the familiar and the exceptional was everywhere around me. A bullock cart was drawn up beside a modern sports car at a traffic signal. A man squatted to relieve himself behind the discrete shelter of a satellite dish. An electric forklift truck was being used to unload goods from an ancient wooden cart with wooden wheels. The impression was of a plodding, indefatigable, and distant past that had crashed intact, though barriers of time, into its own future. I liked it.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:42 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured. I realized, somehow, that through the screaming in 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.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:41 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment!