Browsing Quotes, page 115
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“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! -
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!
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