Recently finished this amazing book. It came to me via a reccommendation from my friend Yuri who I will be forever grateful that he shared the title with me. When I bought it from amazon one of the editors had written something along the lines of "this book will come to you for a reason...only when you're ready." Why ever it came to me I'm glad it did. And slowly I've been typing up my favorite quotes which there are many. Here are those just from the first 6 chapters. Enjoy.
SHANTARAM- by Gregory David Roberts: Chapter 1-6
*It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured. I realized, somehow, through the screaming in my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: fee to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them. It doesn’t sound like much, I know. But in the flinch and bite of the chain, when it’s all you’ve got, that freedom is a universe of possibility. And the choice you make, between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.
*So it begins, this story, like everything else—with a woman, and a city, and a little bit of luck.
*It’s the sweet, sweating smell of hope, which is the opposite of hate; and it’s the sour, stifled smell of greed, which is the opposite of love. Bombay…it’s the worst good smell in the world.
*The fact of the fugitive life is that you have to keep on escaping, every day and every night. Every day, when you’re on the run, is the whole of your life. Every free minute is a short story with a happy ending.
*The slums went on, and their sheer ubiquity wore down my foreigner’s pieties. A kind of wonder possessed me. I felt defiled by my own health and the money in my pockets. I began to look beyond the immensity of the slum societies, and to see the people who lived within them. And then, last, what should’ve been first, I saw how beautiful they were.
*Two pairs of clear, pale-blue eyes stared at me with the vague, almost accusatory censure of those who’ve convinced themselves that they’ve found the one true path.
*The touch was exactly what the touch of a lover’s hand should be: familiar, yet exciting as a whispered promise.
*The legends say that the loved one is instantly recognized because she’s loved in every gesture, every expression of thought, every movement, every sound, and every mood that prays in her eyes. The legends say that we know her by her wings—the wings that only we can see—and because wanting her kills every other desire of love.
*But wisdom, in one sense, is the opposite of love. Love survives in us precisely because I isn’t wise.
*“Maybe you will become such good and closely friends that you will have it a lot of sexes together, and make a full enjoyment of your bodies. I am sure you will have a friendly pleasure.” P
*Fate needs accomplices, and the stones in destiny’s walls are mortared with small and heedless complicities such as those. (in his renaming to 'Lin'…which means Penis)
*Prabaker had just then decided to like me, and for him that meant he was bound to a scrupulous and literal honesty in everything he said or did. It was at once his most endearing and most irritating quality, that he always told me the whole of the truth.
*I didn’t tell her about it. I wish now with all my heart that I did. The past reflects eternally between two mirrors—the bright mirror of words and deeds, and the dark one, full of things we didn’t do or say.
*She looked the world in the eye and stared it down, and I liked that about her because I didn’t love the world then. The world wanted to kill me or catch me. Repression breeds resistance in some men, and I was resisting the world with every minute of my life.
*The world and I are not on speaking terms. The world keeps trying to win me back, but it doesn’t work. I guess I’m just not the forgiving type.
*I knew the determination in her that was almost brutal, and the courage that was almost cruel, and the lonely, angry longing to be loved.
*I was numb, in those first years after my escape: no-one and nothing, could really hurt me. No-one and nothing could make me very happy. I was tough, which is probably the saddest thing you can say about a man.
*You’re a good listener. That’s dangerous, because it’s so hard to resist. Being listened to—really listened to—is the second-best thing in the world. The best thing in the world is power. “What about sex?” No. Apart from biology, sex is all about power. That’s why it’s such a rush. “And what about love?” No. Love is the opposite of power. That’s why we fear it so much.
*Craziness is the basis of every fine relationship.
*Writing was one of the things that saved me: the discipline and abstraction of putting my life into words, every day, helped me to cope with shame and its first cousin, despair.
*There’s no system that’s immune to the misuse of money.
*A man has to draw the line somewhere. Civilization, after all, is defined by what we forbid, more than what we permit.
*When you judge the power that is in a person, you must judge their capacities as both friend and as enemy.
*Friendship is something that gets harder to understand, every damn year of my life. Friendship is like a kind of algebra test that nobody passes. In my worst moods, I think the best you can say is that a friend is anyone you don’t despise.
*Hypocrisy is just another kind of cruelty.
*Truth is a bully we all pretend to like.
*The sea is so frightening that it turns people to stone. You see them standing on the deserted beaches, and staring at the sea—statues, scattered along the beach between cliffs, frozen stiff by the terror they feel when they look at the ocean.
*I think I love America most of all. There’s something so confident and open-hearted and…and brave about America, and the American people. (karla)
*She would’ve done anything for him. Some women are like that. Some loves are like that. Most loves are like that. Your heart starts to feel like an over-crowded lifeboat. You throw your pride out to keep it afloat, and your self-respect and your independence. After a while you start throwing people out—your friends, everyone you used to know. And it’s still not enough. The lifeboat is still sinking, and you know it’s going to take you down with it. I’ve seen that happen to a lot of people. I think that’s why I’m sick of love.
*Magic; the trick that connects the ordinary to the impossible.
*If I wanted to stay there, in the city I’d already fallen in love with, I had to change. The city wouldn’t let me be a watcher, aloof and apart. If I wanted to stay, I had to expect that she would drag me into the river of her rapture, and her rage. Sooner or later, I knew, I would have to step off the pavement and into the bloody crowd, and put my body on the line.
*Sometimes, even with the purest intentions, we make things worse when we do our best to make things better.
*Ask any man with a long-enough experience of prisons, and he’ll tell you that all it takes to harden a man’s heart is a system of justice.
*There’s a truth that’s deeper than experience. It’s beyond what we see, or even what we feel. It’s an order of truth that separates the profound from the merely clever, and the reality from the perception. We’re helpless, usually, in the face of it; and the cost of knowing it, like the cost of knowing love, is sometimes greater than any heart would willingly pay. It doesn’t always help us to love the world, but it does prevent us from hating the world. And the only way to know that truth is to share it, from heart to heart.
*There’s a dark feeling—less than hatred, but more than loathing—that ugly men feel for handsome men. It’s unreasonable and unjustified, of course, but it’s always there. It creeps out, into the light of your eyes, when you’re falling in love with a beautiful woman.
*People who can wear an obsession with panache, always win me over because their honesty speaks directly to my heart.
*Optimism is the first cousin of love, and it’s exactly like love in three ways: it’s pushy, it has no real sense of humor, and it turns up where you least expect it.
*We all have to earn our futures. If we don’t earn it, we don’t have a future at all. And if we don’t earn it, if we don’t deserve it, we have to live in the present, more or less forever. Or worse, we have to live in the past. I think that’s probably what love is—a way of earning the future.
*The facts of life are very simple. In the beginning we feared everything—animals, the weather, the trees, the night sky—everything except each other. Now we fear each other, and almost nothing else. No-one knows why anyone does anything. No-one tells the truth. No-one is happy. No-one is safe. In the face of all that is so wrong with the world, the very worst thing you can do is survive. And yet you must survive. It is this dilemma that makes us believe and cling to the lie that we have a soul, and that there is a God who cares about its fate.
*If you have to ask the question, you have no right to the answer.
*The real trick in life is to want nothing, and to succeed in getting it.
*Wisdom is just cleverness, with all the guts kicked out of it. I’d rather be clever than wise, any day. Most of the wise people I know give me a headache, but I never met a clever man or woman I didn’t like. If I was giving wise advice—which I’m not—I’d say don’t get drunk, don’t spend all your money, and don’t fall in love with a pretty village girl. That would be wise. That’s the difference between clever and wise. I prefer to be clever, and that’s why I told you to surrender, when you get to the village, no matter what you find when you get there.
*When will it be the time? “I think…a little bit almost quite very soon, and not long.” Prab
*There was pride in his face, but he was sad, and tired, and worried. I realized that all farmers, everywhere, are just as tired, worried, proud, and sad: that the soil you turn and the seed you sow are all you have, when you live and work the Earth. And sometimes, much too often, there’s nothing more than that—the silent, secret, heartbreaking joy God puts into things that bloom and grow—to help you face the fear of hunger and dread of evil.
*“He wants you to pat his tummies” No “A few pats only. It won’t bite you, my father’s tummies.” …Sometimes you have to surrender before you win. Surrender is at the heart of the human experience.
*It was there, when another man’s father reached out to comfort me, that I saw and felt the torment of what I’d done, and what I’d become. My heart broke on the shame and sorrow. I suddenly knew how much crying there was in me, and how little love. I knew, at last, how lonely I was. But I couldn’t respond. My culture had taught me all the wrong things so well. So I lay completely still, and gave no reaction at all. But the soul has no culture. The soul has no nations. The soul has no color or accent or way of life. The soul is forever. The soul is one. And when the heart has its moments of truth and sorrow, the soul can’t be stilled.
*One of the reasons why we crave love, and seek it so desperately, is that love is the only cure for loneliness, and shame, and sorrow. But some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only loneliness can help you find them again. Some truths about yourself are so painful that only shame can help you live with them. And some things are just so sad that only your soul can do the crying for you.
*She was a woman to admire and to desire, but the message in her eye and her bearing was unmistakable: offend or disesteem her at your peril.
*In that poor and simple village, no-one doubted or forgot that its treasures were its people.
*No happiness exists without its woe, no wealth without its cost, and no life without its full measure, sooner or later, of sorrowing and death.
*Women, with no outlet for their special creativities, endured the long, quiet ruin of their talents. Others watched the slow waste of bright children who could’ve been more and done more in some other, busier place, but never would know more than the village, the fields, and the river.
*If an abundance of good food, laughter, singing, and an amiable disposition can be taken as indicators of well-being and happiness, then the villagers eclipsed their western counterparts in those qualities of life.
*There was a sense of certainty in the village: the certainty emerges when the soil, and the generations who work it, become interchangeable; when the identities of the human beings and the nature of the place are one and the same. Cities are centers of constant and irreversible change. The definitive sound of a city is the rattlesnake chatter of a jackhammer—the warning sound you hear as the business reptile strikes.
*There is a river that runs through every one of us, no matter where we come from, all over the world. It’s the river of the heart, and the heart’s desire. It’s the pure, essential truth of what each one of us is, and can achieve. All my life I’d been a fighter. I was always ready, too ready, to fight for what I loved, and against what I deplored. In the end, I became the expression of that fight, and my real nature was concealed behind a mask of menace and hostility. The message of my face and my body movement was ‘Don’t fuck with me.’ In the end, I became so good at expressing the sentiment that the whole of my life became the message. No one in the village could read my body language…so it didn’t work. They took me as a peaceful man. I was given a chance to reinvent myself, to follow that river within, and become the man I’d always wanted to be. I became: Shantaram ‘man of peace’.
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