Memorable Lines from Novel ‘Shantaram’ by Gregory David Roberts

Shantaram is, quite simply, the Arabian Nights of the new century. Anyone who loves to read has been looking for this book all their reaing life. A novel of high adventure, great storytelling and moral purpose, based on an extraordinary true story of eight years in the Bombay underworld.Following are some of the famous quotes / lines from the novel....

•‘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 everyone 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.’

•‘Luck is what happens to you when fate gets tired of waiting’

•‘I hope that bear got away.’

•‘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.’

•‘There are few things more discomforting than a spontaneous outburst of genuine decency from someone you’re determined to dislike for no good reason.’

•‘She once told me that heroes only come in three kinds: dead, damaged, or dubious.’

•‘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.’

•‘It’s bad, loving someone you can’t forgive. It’s not as bad as loving someone you can’t have’

•‘Virtue is concerned with what we do, and honour is concerned with how we do it.’

•‘In its essence, honour is the art of being humble. And gangsters, just like cops, politicians, soldiers, and holy men, are only ever good at what they do if they stay humble’.

•Men wage wars for profit and principle, but they fight them for land and women.

•‘She finds useful and talented foreigners, such as you are. She finds people who can work for us, when we need them.’

•‘Whatever wrong I have done, I did for the right reasons. I never did more to you than I thought you could bear. And you should know, you must know, that I always felt for you as if you were my friend, and my beloved son’.

•‘You asked me what my cause is. The only cause I’ve got is my own freedom. And right now that means being free of you, forever.’

•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 anymore, but still I loved them.

•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.

•Every guru you meet and every teacher, every prophet and every philosopher, should answer these two questions for you: What is an objective, universally acceptable definition of good and evil? And, What is the relationship between consciousness and matter?

•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.

•There are three things that no Indian man can resist: a beautiful face, a beautiful song, and an invitation to dance.

•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.

•I loved him so much that in the end I found an empty corner in a cleaner’s room, where a tap dripped constantly into a concrete trough, and I fell to my knees on a place marked by two wet footprints, and I begged God to let him die. And then he did die.

•A man is truly a man when he wins the love of a good woman, earns her respect, and keeps her trust. Until you can do that, you’re not a man.

•There are two kinds of people who enter a deadly conflict: those who kill to live, and those who live to kill. The ones who like killing might come into a fight with most of the fire and fury, but the man or woman who fights just to live, who kills just to survive, will usually come out of it on top. If the killer-type begins to lose the fight, his reason for fighting it fades. If the survivor-type begins to lose, his reason for fighting it flares up fiercer than ever.

•What I do know now, and didn’t know then is that, in the long run, motive matters more with good deeds than it does with bad. 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 concealed, creep from their shadows. They cling to us, those dark motives for our good deeds.

•Redemption’s climb is the steepest if the good we did is soiled with secret shame.