Gregory David Roberts Quotes

76 Sourced Quotes

But I smiled, and smiling was easy, no matter how strange and disorienting the street seemed to be. I was a fugitive. I was a wanted man, a hunted man, with a price on my head. And I was still one step ahead of them. I was free. Every day, when you're on the run, is the whole of your life. Every free minute is a short story with a happy ending.

Gregory David Roberts
Never let anyone know what you're thinking - always know what the other thinks of you.

Gregory David Roberts
If you could be happy, really happy, for just a while, but you knew from the start that it would end in sadness, and bring pain afterwards, would you choose to have that happiness or would you avoid it?

Gregory David Roberts
I sometimes think that the size of our happiness is inversely proportional to the size of our house.

Gregory David Roberts
I think that we all, each one of us, we all have to earn our future.

Gregory David Roberts
The man grinned back at me with that perfect sincerity we fear and call simple-minded.

Gregory David Roberts
Glory belongs to God, of course; that's what the word really means. And you can't serve God with a gun.

Gregory David Roberts
I look back, now, and I know that the naming moment, which seemed so insignificant then, which seemed to demand no more than an arbitrary and superstitious yes or no, was in fact a pivotal moment in my life.

Gregory David Roberts
The amount of force and violence necessary to board the train, for example was no less and no more than the amoount of politeness and consideration necessary to ensure that the cramped journey was as pleasant as possible afterwards. What is necessary? That was the unspoken but implied, and unavoidable question everywhere in India.

Gregory David Roberts
The choking humidity makes amphibians of us all, in Bombay, breathing water in air; you learn to live with it, and you learn to like it, or you leave.

Gregory David Roberts
Do you know the story of the scorpion and the frog? You know, the frog agrees to carry the scorpion across the river, because the scorpion promises not to sting him. And then the scorpion stings the frog, half way across the river. The drowning frog asks him why he did it, when they'll both drown, and the scorpion says that he's a scorpion, and it's his nature to sting.

Gregory David Roberts
The only force more ruthless and cynical than the business of big politics is the politics of big business.

Gregory David Roberts
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 humour, and it turns up where you least expect it.

Gregory David Roberts
People say that love is the best thing in the world not power. But they are wrong. Love is the opposite of power and that's why we fear it so much.

Gregory David Roberts
The truth is that the man I am was born in those moments, as I stood near the flood sticks with my face lifted to the chrismal rain. Shantaram. The better man that, slowly, and much too late, I began to be.

Gregory David Roberts
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.

Gregory David Roberts
I don't know what frightens me more, the power that crushes us, or our endless ability to endure it.

Gregory David Roberts
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.

Gregory David Roberts
Nothing ever fits the palm so perfectly, or feels so right, or inspires so much protective instinct as the hand of a child

Gregory David Roberts
You can never tell what people have inside them until you start taking it away, one hope at a time

Gregory David Roberts
Poverty and pride are devoted blood brothers until one, always and inevitably, kills the other.

Gregory David Roberts
The most precious gift you can bring to your lover is your suffering.

Gregory David Roberts
Men reveal what they think when they look away, and what they feel when they hesitate. With women, it's the other way around

Gregory David Roberts
Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope. Sometimes we cry with everything except tears.

Gregory David Roberts
For all his wisdom, he did not know that love cannot be tested. Honesty can be tested and loyalty. But there is not 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.

Gregory David Roberts
I think the future is like anything else that's important. It has to be earned. If we don't earn it, we don't have a future at all. And if we don't earn it, we don't deserve it, we have to live in the present, more or less forever. Or worse, we have to live in the past. I think that's probably what love is - a way of earning the future.

Gregory David Roberts
A wise man once told me- he's a muslim by the way- that he has more in common with a jew than he does a fanatic of his own religion. He has more in common with a rational, reasonable-minded Christian or a Buddhist or Hindu than he does with a fanatic of his own religion. In fact, he has more in common with a ration, reasonable-minded atheist than he does with a fanatic of his own religion

Gregory David Roberts
But there's no nation uncorrupted. there's no system that's immune to the misuse of money.

Gregory David Roberts
Every life, every love, every action and feeling and thought has its reason and significance: its beginning, and the part it plays in the end. Sometimes, we do see.

Gregory David Roberts
But the soul has no culture. The soul has no nations. The soul has no colour or accent or way of life. The soul is forever. The soul is one. And when the heart has its moment of truth and sorrow, the soul can't be stilled.

Gregory David Roberts