Browsing Quotes With Tag: shantaram (80)
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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! -
“Luck is what happens to you when fate gets tired of waiting,” she murmured.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:38 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
There are few things more discomfiting than a spontaneous outburst of genuine decency from someone you’re determined to dislike for no good reason.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:38 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Kavita stood to give me a hug. It was the tender, close hug that a woman gives a man when she knows she can trust him, or when she’s sure his heart belongs to someone else. It was a rare enough embrace between foreigners. Coming from an Indian woman, it was uniquely intimate in my experience. And it was important. I’d been in the city for years; I could make myself understood in Marathi, Hindi, and Urdu; I could sit with gangsters, slum-dwellers, or Bollywood actors, claiming their goodwill and sometimes their respect; but few things made me feel as accepted, in all the Indian worlds of Bombay, as Kavita Singh’s fond embrace.
I never told her that – what her affectionate and unconditional acceptance meant to me. So much, too much, of the good that I felt in those years of exile was locked in the prison cell of my heart: those tall walls of fear; that small, barred window of hope; that hard bed of shame. I do speak out now. I know now that when the loving, honest moment comes it should be seized, and spoken, because it may never come again. And unvoiced, unmoving, unlived in the things we declare from heart to heart, those true and real feelings wither and crumble in the remembering hand that tries too late to reach for them.Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:37 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
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. Sometimes, we do see. Sometimes, we see the past so clearly, and read the legend of its parts with such acuity, that every stitch of time reveals its purpose, and a kind of message is enfolded in it. Nothing in any life, no matter how well or poorly lived, is wiser than failure or clearer than sorrow. And in the tiny, precious wisdom that they give to us, even those dread and hated enemies, suffering and failure, have their reason and their right to be.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:35 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“Fate always gives you two choices,” Scorpio George once said: “the one you should take, and the one you do.”
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:33 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
But I was alone, and for two reasons. The mafia was theirs, not mine. For them, the organization 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.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:33 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Every door is a portal leading through time as well as space. The same doorway that leads us into and out of a room also leads us into the past of the room and its ceaselessly unfolding future. People knew that once, deep within the ur-mind, the ur-imagination. You can still find those who decorate doorways, and reverently salute them, in every culture, from Ireland to Japan. I stepped up one, two steps, and reached out with my right hand to touch the doorjamb and then touch my chest, over the heart, in a salaam to fate and a homage to the dead friends and enemies who entered with me.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:32 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
And that was the elated moment I’d called glorious, in my mind, as I ran into the guns: that stupid waste of lives, that friendly fire. There wasn’t any glory in it. There never is. There’s only courage and fear and love. And war kills them all, one by one. Glory belongs to God, of course; that’s what the word really means. And you can’t serve God with a gun.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:32 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
I realized that I didn’t need their brilliance any more: it couldn’t help me. All the cleverness in all the world couldn’t stop my stomach from knotting around its prowling fear. When you know you’re going to die, there’s no comfort in cleverness. Genius is vain, and cleverness is hollow, at the end. The comfort that does come, if it comes at all, is that strangely marbled mix of time and place and feeling that we usually call wisdom. For me, on that last night before the battle, it was the sound of my mother’s voice, and it was the life and death of my friend Prabaker.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:31 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! -
Men wage wars for profit and principle, but they fight them for land and women. Sooner or later, the other causes and compelling reasons drown in blood and lose their meaning. Sooner or later, death and survival clog the senses. Sooner or later, surviving is the only logic, and dying is the only voice and vision. Then, when best friends die screaming, and good men maddened with pain and fury lose their minds in the bloody pit, when all the fairness and justice and beauty in the world is blown away with arms and legs and heads of brothers and sons and fathers, then, what makes men fight on, and die, and keep on dying, year after year, is the will to protect the land and the woman.
You know that’s true when you listen to them, in the hours before they go into battle. They talk about home, and they talk about the women they love. And you know it’s true when you watch them die. If he’s near the earth or on the earth in the last moments, a dying man reaches out for it, to squeeze a grasp of soil in his hand. If he can, he’ll raise his head to look at the mountain, the valley, or the plain. If he’s a long way from home, he’ll think about it, and he’ll talk about it. He’ll talk about his village, or his home town, or the city where he grew up. The land matters, at the end. And at the very last, he won’t scream of causes. At the very last, he’ll murmur or he’ll cry out the name of a sister or a daughter or a lover or a mother, even as he speaks the name of his God. The end mirrors the beginning. In the end, it’s a woman, and a city.Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:26 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! -
“Remember,” Khader said insistently, resting his hand on my forearm to emphasize 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.”
…Once before he’d tormented me with that phrase. I chewed at it, in my mind, as a bear will chew at a leather strap that binds it by the leg. In my life, the wrong things were almost always done for the wrong reasons. Even the right things that I did were too often goaded by the wrong reasons.Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:25 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Jealousy, like the flawed love that bears it, has no respect for time or space or wisely reasoned argument. Jealousy can raise the dead with a single, spiteful taunt, or hate a perfect stranger for nothing more than the sound of his name.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:19 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“I don’t know. My friend Didier says that praising people behind their back is monstrously unfair, because the one thing you can’t defend yourself against is the good that people say about you.”
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:10 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
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 now 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 crash like fallen trees when we cry.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 10:08 PMComments: 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!