Shantaram (Part Three) - Gregory David Roberts

"We have a saying, in the Pashto language, and the meaning of it is that you are not a man until you give your love, truly and freely, to a child. And you are not a good man until you earn the love, truly and freely, of a child in return"

- Kaderbhai consoling Lin on his loss of Tariq (353)

Some of the worst things, Karla once said, were caused by people who tried to change things

- Karla (367)

What characterizes the human race more, Karla once asked me , cruelty, or the capacity to feel shame for it? I thought the question acutely clever then, when i first heard it, but I'm lonelier and wiser now, and i know it isn't cruelty or shame that characterizes the human race. It's forgiveness that makes us what we are.....without that [], 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.

- Lin, reflecting on the "saving" of Joseph (370)

I smoked in those days, because, like everyone in the world who smokes, I wanted to die at least as much as I wanted to live

- Lin (371)

But in a way you can say that after leaving the sea, after all those millions of years of living inside of the sea, we took the ocean with us. When a woman makes a baby, she gives it water, inside her body to grow in. That water inside her body is almost exactly the same as the water of the sea. It is salty, by just the same amount. She makes a little ocean in her body. And not only this. our blood and our sweating, they are both salty, almost exactly like the water from the sea is salty. We carry oceans inside of us, in our blood and sweat. And we are crying the oceans, in our tears.

- Johnny Cigar, reflecting at the Colaba Back Bay (374)

Every virtuous act has some dark secret in its heart, Kaderbhai once told me, and every risk we take contains a mystery that can't be solved.

- Kaderbhai (415)

Guilt is the hilt of the knife that we use on ourselves, and love is often the blade; but its worry that keeps the knife sharp, and worry that gets most of us, in the end.

- Lin, worrying about his past catching up with him at Arthur Road(426)

If babies had wings, he'd be the kind that pulled them off

- Lettie about Maurizio (428)

The worst things that people do to us always make us feel ashamed. The worst things that people do always strike at the part of us that wants to love the world. And a tiny part of the shame we feel, when we're violated, is shame at being human.

- Lin, on his chains at Arthur Road (432)

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.

- Lin, on his release from prison (439)

Khaled, my first teacher, was the kind of man who carried his past in the temple fire of his eyes, and fed the flames with pieces of his broken heart.

- Lin's new life of crime (443)

There's a little arrogance at the heart of every better self. That arrogance left me when I failed to save my neighbour's life - failed even to know that she was ill. And there's an innocence, essential and unblinking, in the heart of every determination to serve. That innocence faltered when i stumbled from the Indian prison: my smile, no less than my footsteps, hobbled by the memory of the leg-irons. Moving out of the slum had as much or more to do with the state of my soul as it did with the wounds on my body.

- Lin putting in words what I didn't think could be put into words (451)

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. Sooner or later we meet the drunkard, the waster, the betrayer, the ruthless mind and the hate-filled heart. But fate loads the dice, of course, because we usually find outselves loving or pitying almost all of those people. And its impossible to despise someone you honestly pity, and to shun someone you truly love.

- see above comment (471)

Kaderbhai expounding on his "Grand Resolution Theory", the objectivity of Good v/s Evil, and about how we sometime do the wrong things....for the right reasons

- (478-486)

Karla once said that men reveal what they think when they look away, and what they feel when they hesitate. With women, she said, its the other way around.

- Karla (487)

Madjid Rhustem was simply the kind of man who thought that smiling was an act of will

- Lin's tutor in the Gold trade (490)

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.

- Karla on love (504)

No politcal 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.

- Lin philosophy, before life had it's say (509)

Its 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 didn't really hear the fear and anguish in it.

- Lin on being a fool in love (511)

I stopped the bike and shielded my eyes to look for her. But she way gone. There was nothing but the waves breaking like the curved spines of playful porpoises, and the traceless, empty, tousled sheets of sand.

- Lin, on leaving Goa and Karla (514)