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crosses
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Gregory David Roberts |
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It doesn't always help us to love the world, but it does prevent us from hating the world. And the only way to know that truth is to share it, from heart to heart,
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Gregory David Roberts |
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It's unreasonable and unjustified, of course, but it's always there, hiding in the long shadow thrown by envy.
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Gregory David Roberts |
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The Source of all things, the luminescence, has more forms than heaven's stars, sure. And
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Gregory David Roberts |
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the real trick in life is to want nothing, and to succeed in getting it.
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Gregory David Roberts |
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Khaderbhai once said that every virtuous act is inspired by a dark secret.
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Gregory David Roberts |
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It was the desolate terror of a man who knows that fate has abandoned him, and death's already inside, stretching and swelling and filling up the life-space that used to be his. It
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Gregory David Roberts |
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The truth is a bully we all pretend to like. I
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Gregory David Roberts |
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Magic, the trick that connects the ordinary to the impossible, was the invisible river that ran through every street and beating heart in Bombay in those years, and nothing, from the postal service to the pleading of beggars, worked without a measure of it.
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Gregory David Roberts |
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and my heart was as clean and hungry for promises as a monsoon morning in the gardens of Malabar.
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Gregory David Roberts |
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You can be happy and afraid and angry in your dreams, but you have to be wide awake to be sad, don't you think?
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Gregory David Roberts |
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The ancient Sanskrit legends speak of a destined love, a karmic connection between souls that are fated to meet and collide and enrapture one another. The legends say that the loved one is instantly recognised because she's loved in every gesture, every expression of thought, every movement, every sound, and every mood that prays in her eyes. The legends say that we know her by her wings--the wings that only we can see--and because wanting ..
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Gregory David Roberts |
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I think that suffering is the way we test our love. Every act of suffering, no matter how small or agonisingly great, is a test of love in some way. Most of the time, suffering is also a test of our love for God... I think that there are two points about suffering that we should remember, and they have to do with pleasure and pain. The first is this: that pain and suffering are connected, but they are not the same thing. Pain can exist with..
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Gregory David Roberts |
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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 found in the worst sorrow. They're honest, because the truth..
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Gregory David Roberts |
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Money isn't the root of all evil. Evil is the root of all money. There's no such thing as clean money. All the money in the world is dirty, in some way, because there's no clean way to make it. If you get paid in money, somebody, somewhere, is suffering for it. That's one of the reasons, I think, why just about everybody--even people who'd never break the law in any other way--is happy to add an extra buck or two to their money on the black..
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Gregory David Roberts |
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Suffering is the truth. Not suffering is the lie. I told you that, once before. That's just the way the world is.
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Gregory David Roberts |
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And her forehead was always slightly creased in the centre, between the brows, as if she was grasping, in those soft folds of skin, the monstrous and pitiable understanding that no happiness exists without its woe, no wealth without its cost, and no life without its full measure, sooner or later, of sorrowing and death.
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Gregory David Roberts |
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fair . . . forgiving . . . punish . . . and save . . .
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Gregory David Roberts |
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the student is ready, the teacher appears--
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Gregory David Roberts |
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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.
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Gregory David Roberts |
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Whatever you do in life, do it with courage,
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Gregory David Roberts |
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He says that strong men make the luck to happen,
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Gregory David Roberts |
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Nothing in any life, no matter how well or poorly lived, is wiser than failure or clearer than sorrow. And
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Gregory David Roberts |
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into trouble we didn't need. And I tried to talk Khaderbhai out of it. I tried to get them to stop. But I didn't feel anything about it, even when they killed Madjid. And I . . . I used to like him, you know? I liked old Madjid. He was the best of them, in a way. But I didn't feel anything when he died. And I didn't feel it, not even a bit, when Khader told me he had to leave you in jail and let you get beaten up. I liked you--more than I l..
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Gregory David Roberts |
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And when you left, I didn't feel anything at all. Not a thing. I didn't want to be forgiven because of what I did. I wanted to be forgiven--and I still
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Gregory David Roberts |
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want it, and that's why I'm going to Khaled and Idriss--because I don't feel sorry for any of it, and I don't regret a thing. I'm cold inside, Lin. I like people, and I like things, but I don't love any of them--not even myself--and I don't really care about them. And, you know, the strange thing is, I don't really wish that I did care.
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Gregory David Roberts |
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He'd been trying to tell me that every human will has the power to transform its fate. I'd always
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Gregory David Roberts |
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was something unchangeable: fixed for every one of us at birth, and as constant as the circuit of the stars. But I suddenly realised 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.
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Gregory David Roberts |
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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.
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Gregory David Roberts |
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The cloak of the past is cut from patches of feeling, and sewn with rebus threads. Most of the time, the best we can do is wrap it around ourselves for comfort or drag it behind us as we struggle to go on. But everything has its cause and its meaning. 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.
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Gregory David Roberts |
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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.
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Gregory David Roberts |
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Anarchists...' I began and then faltered. 'No political philosophy I ever heard of loves the human race as much as anarchism. Every other way of looking at the world says that people have to be controlled, and ordered around, and governed. Only the anarchists trust human beings enough to let them work it out for themselves. And I used to be that optimistic once. I used to believe and think like that. But I don't, any more. So, no--I guess I..
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Gregory David Roberts |
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It's a fact of being in love that we often pay no attention whatsoever to the substance of what a lover says, while being intoxicated to ecstasy by the way it's said. I was in love with her eyes, but I didn't read them. I loved her voice, but I didn't really hear the fear and the anguish in it.
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Gregory David Roberts |
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It was the kind of closeness that didn't need conversation to sustain itself: quite often we would meet, travel to the gym, work out on the weights, box a few rounds, spend half an hour sparring at karate, and speak no more than ten words to one another.
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Gregory David Roberts |
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She had to do that--she had to become a widow, for life, before she was even married. That's why I never got married. I'm thirty-eight years old. I can read and write very well--my mother made sure I was educated--and I do the bookwork for all the shops and businesses in the slum. I do the taxes for every man who pays them. I make a good living here, and I have respect. I shouldn't been married fifteen or even twenty years ago. But she was ..
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Gregory David Roberts |
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There are many things I have done that I can say, I am not proud. But there is only one act in my whole life that I can say, I am truly ashamed of it. I hurried past that great man, and I had money enough and time enough and good health enough to help him. I hurried past him, not because I felt guilty about the theft of his money. And not because I was afraid of his sickness, or the commitment it might cost me. I hurried past that good and ..
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Gregory David Roberts |
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Khaderbhai once said that every virtuous act is inspired by a dark secret. It mightn't be true of everyone, but it was true enough about me. The little good that I've done in the world has always dragged behind it a shadow of dark inspiration... ...When all the guilt and shame for the bad we've done have run their course, it's the good we did that can save us. But then, when salvation speaks, the secrets we kept, and the motives we conceale..
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Gregory David Roberts |
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The smile he gave me was warm, but he was still wounded by his mother's death. There was a hollowness in his eyes: a black hole of shocked grieving that swallowed all the questions and released no answers. When he returned to his work, cutting lengths of coconut-fibre rope for the men to tie around bamboo bracing poles, his young face assumed a numb expression. I knew that expression: I sometimes caught it, by chance, in the mirror: the way..
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Gregory David Roberts |
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It's said that you can never go home again, and it's true enough, of course. But the opposite is also true. You must go back, and you always go back, and you can never stop going back, no matter how hard you try.
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Gregory David Roberts |
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The fugitive kind run, trying against their hearts to annihilate the past, and with it every tell-tale trace of what they were, where they came from, and those who once loved them. And they run into that extinction of themselves, to survive, but they always fail. We can deny the past, but we can't escape its torment because the past is a speaking shadow that keeps pace with the truth of what we are, step for step, until we die.
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Gregory David Roberts |
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Fanaticism is the opposite of love,' I said, recalling one of Khaderbhai's lectures. 'A wise man once told me--he's a Muslim, by the way--that he has more in common with a rational, reasonable-minded Jew than he does with a fanatic from his own religion.
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Gregory David Roberts |
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Personality and personal identity are in some ways like co-ordinates on the street map drawn by our intersecting relationships. We know who we are and define what we are by references to the people we love and our reasons for loving them. I was that point in space and time where Abdullah's wild violence intersected with Prabaker's happy gentleness.
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Gregory David Roberts |
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The tears, when they come to some men, are worse than beatings. They're wounded worse by sobbing, men like that, than they are by boots and batons. Tears begin in the heart, but some of us deny the heart so often, and for so long, that when it speaks we hear not one but a hundred sorrows in the heartbreak. We know that crying isn't a weakness, but a kind of strength. Still, the weeping rips us root by tangled root from the earth, and we cra..
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Gregory David Roberts |
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Istnieje taki rodzaj szczescia, ktory polega glownie na znalezieniu sie w odpowiednim miejscu we wlasciwym czasie, rodzaj natchnienia, ktory podpowiada tylko, jak zrobic wlasciwa rzecz w odpowiedni sposob, i to wszystko przychodzi jedynie wtedy, gdy oczyszczamy serce z ambicji, celow i planow, kiedy poddajemy sie bez reszty temu szczesliwemu, opatrznosciowemu momentowi.
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Gregory David Roberts |