Browsing Quotes With Tag: love (137)
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For this is what we do. Put one foot forward and then the other. Lift our eyes to the snarl and smile of the world once more. Think. Act. Feel. Add our little consequence to the tides of good and evil that flood and drain the world. Drag our shadowed crosses into the hope of another night. Push our brave hearts into the promise of a new day. With love: the passionate search for a truth other than our own. With longing: the pure, ineffable yearning to be saved. For so long as fate keeps waiting, we live on. God help us. God forgive us. We live on.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:44 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
I gave the boy back into Parvati’s arms, and wiped a hand across my face and into my hair. Looking at the people, listening to the breathing, heaving, laughing, struggling music of the slum, all around me, I remembered one of Khaderbhai’s favorite phrases. Every human heartbeat, he’d said many times, is a universe of possibilities. And it seemed to me that I finally understood exactly what he’d meant. He’d been trying to tell me that every human will has the power to transform its fate. I’d always thought that fate was something unchangeable: fixed for every one of us at birth, and as constant as the circuit of the stars. But I suddenly realized that life is stranger and more beautiful than that. The truth is that, no matter what kind of game you find yourself in, no matter how good or bad the luck, you can change your life completely with a single thought or a single act of love.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:42 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“It is always a fool’s mistake,” Didier once said to me, “to be alone with someone you shouldn’t have loved.”
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:39 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
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! -
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! -
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! -
“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! -
“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! -
“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! -
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! -
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! -
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! -
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! -
“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!