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941e196
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And I'd learned, the hard way, that sometimes, even with the purest intentions, we make things worse when we do our best to make things better.
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good
intentions
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Gregory David Roberts |
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3bced39
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There's a truth deeper than experience. It's beyond what we see, or even what we feel. It's an order of truth that separates the profound from the merely clever, and the reality from the perception. We're helpless, usually, in the face of it; and the cost of knowing it, like the cost of knowing love, is sometimes greater than any heart would willingly pay. It doesn't always help us to love the world, but it does prevent us from hating the w..
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Gregory David Roberts |
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ce294e2
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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 discreet 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 through bar..
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india
modern-times
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Gregory David Roberts |
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8c4caf1
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Waiting for nothing, that is what kills the heart of a man, isn't it?
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Gregory David Roberts |
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a44d3e9
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The more you try to be like someone else, the more you find yourself standing in the way.
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gregory david roberts |
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ee314da
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But I couldn't respond. My culture had taught me all the wrong things well. So I lay completely still, and gave no reaction at all. 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. I clenched my teeth against the stars. I closed my eyes. I surrendered to sleep. One of t..
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Gregory David Roberts |
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8de724f
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Every virtuous act has some Dark secret in its heart; every risk we take contains a mystery that can't be solved.
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shantaram
mysterious
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Gregory David Roberts |
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c11c3fb
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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.
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Gregory David Roberts |
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2283b14
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A young man didn't bring flowers or chocolates to the woman he loved: He brought her stories from the wider world, where men grappled with demons of desire, and monstrous injustice.
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Gregory David Roberts |
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11b887a
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Remember,' Khader said insistently, resting his hand on my forearm to emphasise his words. 'Sometimes it is necessary to do the wrong thing for the right reasons. The important thing is to be sure that our reasons are right, and that we admit the wrong--that we do not lie to ourselves, and convince ourselves that what we do is right.
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Gregory David Roberts |
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ca1090e
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And money, if the pile gets high enough, is something like a big political party: it does as much harm as it does good, it puts too much power in too few hands, and the closer you come to it the dirtier you get.
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Gregory David Roberts |
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cfd1514
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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.
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Gregory David Roberts |
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f3704ca
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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.
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Gregory David Roberts |
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d9314da
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In the face of all that is so wrong with the world, the very worst thing you can do is survive. And yet you must survive. It is this dilemma that makes us believe and cling to the lie that we have a soul, and that there is a God who cares about its fate.
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Gregory David Roberts |
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903158e
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That's how we keep this crazy place together - with the heart. Two hundred fuckin' languages, and a billion people. India is the heart. It's the heart that keeps us together. There's no place with people like my people, Lin. There's no heart like the Indian heart.
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Gregory David Roberts |
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6b1c6e9
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Alone is current in truth's river, like togetherness. Alone has its own fidelity. But when you navigate that closer view of the shore, it often seems that faith you have in yourself is all the faith there is.
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Gregory David Roberts |
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dac2142
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But survival means more than simply being alive. It's not just the body that must survive a jail term: the spirit and the will and the heart have to make it through as well. If any one of them is broken or destroyed, the man whose living body walks through the gate, at the end of his sentence, can't be said to have survived it.
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Gregory David Roberts |
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df4ac42
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A dream is a place where a wish and a fear meet. When the wish and the fear are exactly the same we call the dream a nightmare.
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interpretation
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Gregory David Roberts |
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46c0e3e
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The voice, Afghan matchmakers say, is more than half of love.
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Gregory David Roberts |
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993ec7d
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Poverty and pride are devoted blood brothers until one, always and inevitably, kills the other.
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Gregory David Roberts |
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bcc3df6
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What we call cowardice is often just another name for being taken by surprise, and courage is seldom any better than simply being well prepared.
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Gregory David Roberts |
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75b7df2
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Motive matters more with good deeds than it does with bad.
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Gregory David Roberts |
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ec15d8e
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Slowly, desolately, the fist of what we'd done unclenched the clawed palm of what we'd become.
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Gregory David Roberts |
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ebac1db
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So when will be the time to get on the train? I think.....a little bit almost quite very soon and not long.
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Gregory David Roberts |
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b85fcae
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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 is a good and natural thing. We know that crying isn't a weakness, but a kind of strength. Still, the weeping rips u..
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Gregory David Roberts |
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ec1afdf
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The heart doesn't know how to quit, because it doesn't know how to lie.
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Gregory David Roberts |
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69ff29a
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Regret is a ghost of love. Regret is a nicer self that we send into the past from time to time, even though we know it's too late to change what we said, or did. We do it because it's human: a thing of our kind. We do it because we care, drawn by threads of shame that only fray and wither in the sea of regret.
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Gregory David Roberts |
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c3643fc
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La sencilla y sorprendente verdad sobre la India y sobre su gente es que cuando vas a su pais y tratas con ellos, el corazon siempre te guia mas sabiamente que la cabeza. No hay lugar en el mundo donde eso sea mas cierto.
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spanish
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Gregory David Roberts |
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b8a7831
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It isn't a secret, unless keeping it hurts.
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Gregory David Roberts |
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4a426a0
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If fate doesn't make you laugh, Karla said, in one of my first conversations with her, then you just don't get the joke.
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Gregory David Roberts |
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4c8eb67
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Indian actors know how to shout with the eyes.
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Gregory David Roberts |
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60bb70c
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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.
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Gregory David Roberts |
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72c0f89
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Mistakes are like bad loves, the more you learn from, the more you wish they'd never happened.
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retrospection
mistakes
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Gregory David Roberts |
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17f5882
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Gimme an honest frown over a false smile, any day.
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smile
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Gregory David Roberts |
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cb90c78
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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.
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Gregory David Roberts |
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a36de59
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I know now that it's the sweet, sweating smell of hope, which is opposite of hate; and it's the sour, stifled smell of greed, which is the opposite of love.
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life-in-city
mumbai
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Gregory David Roberts |
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4841490
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None of us lie or guard our secrets when we sing, and India is a nation of singers whose first love is the kind of song we turn to when crying just isn't enough.
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Gregory David Roberts |
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3f33e07
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When the heart has its moment of truth & sorrow, the soul can't be stilled.
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Gregory David Roberts |
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485cac3
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Fate always gives you two choices, Scorpio George once said: the one you should take, and the one you do.
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Gregory David Roberts |
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86e321c
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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?
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Gregory David Roberts |
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f4e529d
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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. He has more in common with a rational, reasonable-minded Christian or Buddhist or Hindu than he does with a fanatic from his own religion. In fact, he has more in common with a rational, rea..
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Gregory David Roberts |
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c9165a7
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What dream, what hope, what despair drives us to the things we do, just to desert us when the deed is done? What hollow things are they, motive and reason, born at night to fade so quickly in the sunlight of consequence? What we do in life lives on inside us, long after ambition and fear lie frosted and opaqued on forgotten shores. What we do in life, more than what we think or say, is what we are.
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Gregory David Roberts |
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ab2c50a
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If you get in tune with the tendency field, through expanding and exploring the set of positive characteristics within yourself, the tendency field responds with constant energy, and affirmations. If you work against the tendency field, by being negative, unfair, unloving, and unconscious of the truth, you weaken your connection to the tendency field, and you experience existential dread, no matter how rich or famous or powerful you are.
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Gregory David Roberts |
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e6f9247
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The only kingdom that makes any man a king is the kingdom of his own soul. The only power that has any real meaning is the power to better the world.
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Gregory David Roberts |