SHANTARAM: Chapter 31-36
*His grim severity was so stark that it roused me from my own solemnity, and provoked a childish, prankish desire to mock him.
-Some things should be too sweet.
-Praising people behind their backs is monstrously unfair, because the one thing you can’t defend yourself against is the good that people say about you.
-I watched him with a tiny germ of envy at the ease with which he opened his communication with God. I felt no urge to join him, but the sincerity of his meditation made me feel much more alone, somehow in my solitary, unconnected mind.
-In Afghanistan men became leaders by merit—they are good speakers, wise mangers of money, and brave, when fighting is necessary. There is no inherited right to be a leader, and a leader’s son who has no wisdom or courage or skill at speaking to the people will be passed over for another man with better skills.
-I have heard that the people of Scotland are known for their sour and stern ways. They say the people of Scotland are pessimists, who prefer to walk on the dark side of every sunny street. I think that if this is in some way true, it does not also tell us that the people of Scotland find this dark side of things to be very, very funny.
-There’s a theory that snoring at night in sleep is a subconscious defense reflex—a warning sound that frightened potential predators away from the mouth of the cave when our lower-Palaeolithic ancestors huddled in vulnerable sleep.
-While the food was being prepared, I watched as men dragged a foot-operated grinding wheel into an open space, and the groom devoted a tense hour to putting a razor’s edge to a large, ornate dagger. The bride’s father watched that effort with a critical eye. After satisfying himself that the weapon was suitably lethal, he gravely accepted it as a gift from the younger man. “The groom has just sharpened the knife that the bride’s father will use on him, if he ever mistreats the girl.”
-Anything that can be put in a nutshell should remain there.
-There is a test you should apply to every man who tells you that he knows the meaning of life. 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 relationships between consciousness and matter? If he cannot answer these two questions than you know that he has not passed the test.
-When the student is ready, the teacher appears.
-Jealously, 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.
-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.
-I knew that I would never know peace. I would never come to that Eden in the soul, where acceptance of punishment and acknowledgement of wrong and right roll away the troubles that lodge like stones in the barren field of an exiled heart.
-I didn’t start to love her, really, until she walked away from me for the last time. She said once of me that I was interested in everything and committed to nothing. And she was right.
-The Afghans may not be the best men in the world to live with but they are certainly the best men in the world to die with.
-I knew, in the way we know without a word that love is lost, or in the sudden, sure way we know that a friend is false and doesn’t really like us at all, that the war would end much worse, for all of us, than it had begun.
-I hated it all. I knew in my own mind that the new war would change nothing: that wars can’t really change things. It’s peace that makes the deepest cuts.
-I do not think that light is God. I think it is possible, and it is reasonable to say, that light is the language of God. Light may be the way that God speaks to the universe, and to us.
-If you prove to a man how vain his hope is, how vain his hoping was, you kill the bright, believing part of him that wants to be loved.
-I hate you with the whole of my heart. All your wisdom, that’s just what it comes down to, isn’t it? Putting hate in people. You asked me what my cause was. 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 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.
-There’s only so much screaming you can bring yourself to cause when you’re not sure what you’re doing.
-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 know, that love’s a one-way street. Love, like respect, isn’t something you get; it’s something you give.
-When you know you’re going to die, there’s no comfort in cleverness. Genius is vain, and cleverness is hollow, at the end.
-He didn’t believe in anything. He was a rebel without a cause, in a world that doesn’t have enough rebels for the real causes. I don’t like—and I don’t really trust—people who don’t believe in anything.
-I felt I might’ve died there—some pain, sometimes, leaves you without legs or arms.
-Hunger has a will of its own, a will that’s much older than the other will we praise and flatter in the palace of the mind.
-I looked at the men, the brave and beautiful men beside me, running into the guns, and God help me for thinking it, and God forgive me for saying it, but it was glorious, it was glorious, if glory is a magnificent and ruptured exaltation. It was what love would be like, if love was a sin. It was what music would be, if music could kill you. And I climbed a prison wall with every running step.
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