SHANTARAM: Chapter 7-12
Part 2 and Continuing quotes from the wonderful book by Gregory David Robers
*You understand it and accept it when the bad guys work you over. But when the good guys use handcuffs to chain you to a wall, and then take turns to stomp and kick you, it’s the whole system, it’s the whole world, that’s breaking your bones.
*A man can make his way in the city with his heart and his soul crushed within a clenched fist; but to live in a village, he has to unfurl his heart and his soul in his eyes.
*Life on the run puts a lie in the echo of every laugh, and at least a little larceny in every act of love.
*A dream is the place where a wish and a fear meet. When the wish and the fear are exactly the same we call the dream a nightmare.
*The people were simply staring at my fear. They were trying to understand what demons haunted my mind, causing me to dread so terribly the place they knew to be a sanctuary from fates far worse than slum life.
*I knew there was something—some meaning, some purpose, leading me to that place, and that job, at exactly that time. And the force of it was strong enough to bind me to the work, when every intuition tried to warn me away.
*When I committed the armed robberies, I put fear into people. From that time—even as I did the crimes—and on through prison and life on the run, fate put fear into me. The fear I’d put into others became ten terrors, fifty, a thousand, filling the loneliest hours of every night with dread.
*My rich friends feared the poor. My poor friends feared the cops. Most foreigners feared everybody, and kept to their hotels. So, at night, the streets were mine as I searched their cool silences.
*We can compel men not to be bad, but we cannot compel them to be good.
*The worst thing about corruption as a system of governance is that it works so well.
*There is no act of faith more beautiful than the generosity of the very poor.
*There is no believing in God. We either know God, or we do not. I certainly don’t know God, and frankly I’m inclined to think God is impossible to believe in, at least most of the notions of God that I’ve come across. Of course God is impossible. That is the first proof that He exists.
*The sane man is simply a better liar than the insane man.
*Men lie to themselves more than to others, and to others more often than they tell the truth.
*To know the truth, all you have to do is close your eyes. We can know God, for example, and we can know sadness. We can know dreams, and we can know love. But noe of these are real, in our usual sense of things that exist in the world and seem real. We cannot weigh them, or measure their length, or find their basic parts in an atom smasher. Which is why they are possible.
*I know now that there are beginnings, turning points, many of them, in every life; questions of luck and will and fate.
*The truth is found more often in music than it is in books of philosophy.
*Men are just men—it is what they do, or refuse to do, that links them to good and evil. The truth is that an instant of real love, in the heart of anyone—the noblest man alive or the most wicked—has the whole purpose and process and meaning of life within the lotus-folds of its passion. The truth is that we are all, every one of us, every atom, every galaxy, and every particle of matter in the universe, moving toward God.
*Dream the future, plan it, and then make it happen.
*Prison pulls the masks away from men. You can’t hide what you are, in prison. You can’t pretend to be tough. You are, or you’re not, and everyone knows it.
*There is no reason good enough to make us fight with each other. We are all poor men here. There are enemies enough for all of us outside this place. We live together, or we die.
*Justice is a judgment that is both fair and forgiving. Justice is not done until everyone is satisfied, even those who offend us and must be punished by us. Justice is not only the way we punish those who do wrong. It is also the way we try to save them.
*Poverty and pride are devoted blood brothers until one, always and inevitably, kills the other.
*My Dear Brother:
You told me that you are giving the bear hugs to the people. I think this is a custom in your country and even if I think it is very strange and even if I do not understand, I think you must be lonely for it here because in Bombay we have a shortage of bears. So I send you a bear for some hugging. Please enjoy. I hope he is like the hugging bears in your country. God bless you and your brother. -Abdullah
*The ghetto was a living organism: to counter external threats, it responded with the antibodies of courage, solidarity, and that desperate, magnificent love we usually call the survival instinct.
*The people showed thanks, rather than saying it, and I’d come to accept and respect that.
*Fear and guilt are the dark angels that haunt rich men.
*I sometimes think that the size of our happiness is inversely proportional to the size of our house.
*I take everything personally—that’s what being a person is all about.
*A politician is someone who promises you a bridge, even when there’s no river.
*This is crazy, yes, but it is the kind of crazy that many people will agree with, inside the quiet of their own heads.
*I was once described by an ex-girlfriend as ‘interested in everything, and committed to nothing.
*I don’t know what scares me more, the madness that smashes people down, or their ability to endure it.
*It’s such a huge arrogance, to love someone, and there’s too much of it around. There’s too much love in the world. Sometimes I think that’s what heaven is—a place where everybody’s happy because nobody loves anybody else, ever.
*I can't love you...but I’ll be head over heels in like with you if that’s enough.
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