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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 6d7d241 | 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. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 7e34aba | 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. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| b78741f | 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. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 9b13eed | 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.. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| a1a59fd | 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. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 96eb93d | 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. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 5a2141c | 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 .. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| a74f012 | 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 .. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 6f940ea | 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.. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| cf69b76 | 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.. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 871c1c4 | 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. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| de462b4 | 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. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 48b2754 | 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. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 1cbb5c9 | 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. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| a883b80 | 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.. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| e714cb1 | 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. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| bb83766 | To make sure none followed where you led I used my hair to cover our tracks. Sun set on the island of our bed night rose eating echoes and we were beached there, in tangles of flicker, candles whispering at our driftwood backs. Your eyes above me afraid of the promises I might keep regretting the truth we did say less than the lie we didn't, I went in deep, I went in deep, to fight the past for you. Now we both know sorrows are the seeds o.. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| e308050 | One of the agonising truths for a battle medic is that you pray as hard and almost as often for men to die as you pray for them to live. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| e7d5bd9 | You can only ever be yourself. The more you try to be like someone else, the more you find yourself standing in the way. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 40a390d | He who thinks with difficulty believes with alacrity. | Ambrose Bierce | ||
| 37a3982 | But I was alone, and for two reasons: The mafia was theirs, not mine. For them, the organisation always came first. But I was loyal to the men, not the mafia; to the brothers, not the brotherhood. I worked for the mafia, but I didn't join it. I'm not a joiner. I never found a club or clan or idea that was more important to me than the men and women who believed in it. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| f722d7b | No matter how often or deeply I thought about the struggled past or the sorrow and promise of the present, I couldn't make that leap of confidence or trust or faith into the future. There was something missing: some calculation, some piece of evidence or parallax view of my life that would make it all clear to me, I was sure, but I didn't know what it was. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| b7a79b8 | Happiness is a myth, Karla once said. It was invented to make us buy things. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 4e42fc8 | Jealousy, like the flawed love that bears it, has no respect for time or space or wisely reasoned argument. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 2712571 | Suffering, let me see. I think that suffering is a matter of choice. I think that we do not have to suffer anything in this life, if we are strong enough to deny it. The strong man can master his feelings so completely that it is almost impossible to make him suffer. When we do suffer things, like pain and so, it means that we have lost control. So I will say that suffering is a human weakness. - Madjid | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| d51e933 | The burden of happiness can only be relieved by the balm of suffering. -Farid | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 34c6661 | SUNLIGHT SHATTERED ON THE WATER, | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 9ed3e87 | She was a woman to admire and to desire, but the message in her eye and her bearing was unmistakable: offend or disesteem her at your peril. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 8fd1077 | 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. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| bccfa47 | They couldn't understand that every time I entered the slum I felt the urge to let go and surrender to a simpler, poorer life that was yet richer in respect, and love, and a vicinal connectedness to the surrounding sea of human hearts. They couldn't understand what I meant when I talked about the purity of the slum: they'd been there, and seen the wretchedness and filth for themselves. They saw no purity. But they hadn't lived in those mira.. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 0e0bc2a | Virtue is concerned with what we do, and honour is concerned with how we do it. You can fight a war in an honourable way--the Geneva Convention exists for that very reason--and you can enforce the peace without any honour at all. In its essence, honour is the art of being humble. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 62238b2 | 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. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 9b3db27 | 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 .. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| a3c6104 | Is easy--suffering is hungry, isn't it? Hungry, for anything, means suffering. Not hungry for something, means, not suffering. But everybody knows that.' 'Yes, I guess everybody does. Good night, Prabu.' 'Goodnight, Lin. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| bf29c87 | Like many toilets in Goa, it was nothing more than a smooth, steep slope behind the squatting keyhole. Waste matter rolled down the slope to a narrow lane. Wild, hairy, black Goan pigs roamed the lanes, eating the waste. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 0d17cfd | out at them, turning this way and that, his face cramped in an expression | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 77d7fc0 | There is no objective and universally acceptable definition of good and evil. And until we have one, we will go on justifying our own actions, while condemning the actions of the others. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| e108446 | In this life, we do what we can to improve ourselves. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| efabd58 | loves that produce our courage. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| ad400ed | I think I'd hoped to be released by it, and solaced, just by hearing her tell me. But it wasn't like that. I felt empty: the kind of emptiness that's sad but not distressed, pitying but not broken-hearted, and damaged, somehow, but clearer and cleaner for it. And then I knew what it was, that emptiness: there's a name for it, a word we use often, without realizing the universe of peace that's enfolded in it. The word is free. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| b7c6864 | 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 her kills every other desire of love. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| d88d4df | At the moment, most of our ways of defining the unit of morality are similar in their intentions, but they differ in their details. So the priests of one nation bless their soldiers as they march to war, and the imams of another country bless their soldiers as they march out to meet them. And everybody who is involved in the killing, says that he has God on his side. There is no objective and universally acceptable definition of good and ev.. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 3cb2882 | Happiness is a myth, It was invented to make us buy things | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 5b58fae | with the words, but hearing them in | Gregory David Roberts |